It’s always going to be difficult picking up and reopening a series that has already concluded, and Riggs certainly seemed to struggle in creating a new plot line and character arcs in ‘A Map of Days’. He focuses on another string of Jacob’s self-discovery, the first book of the series discovering his own peculiarity and his grandfathers and filling in the mystery of his grandfather’s childhood, and now in the ‘second trilogy’ Jacob seeks to uncover the gaps in his knowledge surrounding his grandfather’s years hollow-hunting in America. 

I think I largely struggled more with this book is because present day America is by no means the atmospheric and gothic setting of the books in the first trilogy, the peculiars going about this setting just feels wrong and its not got that moody atmosphere and history that these books thrive off. Building on this, the amount of plot conveniences employed just to keep the story moving at a fast place and get the characters out of sticky situations felt in a much greater volume than the other books. The

concluding fallout

was disappointing I also fear the novel is setting up a ‘chosen one’ narrative for the rest of the series which could get a bit cliche. I do also believe that Riggs regrets placing Claire among the main cast of peculiars, its quite amusing that she has somehow been written out of every book since the first one but still just lingering there, and while this happened to half the cast in this book its funny that she’s the only one to have been non-existent every time. 

I have been quite critical of ‘A Map of Days’, mainly as it is a massive fall-off from ‘Library of Souls’, but to give it some credit I did still devour it mostly in a a single day. (It’s been a stressful all-over-the-place one people I needed the escapism)