This book is hard to rate, solely because I thought it was going to be so much different than it was. Overall I did enjoy several of the essays and many of the maps were stunning, but I found myself constantly asking the question why?

Of the essays, two really stood out to me: 1) “Mischief Managed” by Miraphora Mina about the Marauder’s Map from the Harry Potter movies and 2) “Uncharted Territory” by Daniel Reeve on the maps for the Lord of the Rings films. But, most of the essays seemed repetitive and even though the book is divided into themed sections, it was hard to differentiate between them. The overwhelming majority of essays seemed to focus on each contributor’s personal discovery of maps (usually in childhood), which made me question why the book was divided into sections to begin with.

With sections such as “Writing Maps” “Creating Maps” and “Reading Maps” I was expecting (and looking forward to) more of a look into the process of creating maps for literature. Many of the contributors were cartographers or authors who had gone through the map-making process for their own books; gaining more of their insight into the process of designing maps would have been extremely interesting.