Winner, First Novel, 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards

From Mapping Eden: "No one said out loud why my mother was gone and all the other mothers were there. It could have been a secret like the things my father knew, things out of books. But it seemed like the other kind of secret, the kind you were punished for telling."

When her dreamy, musical mother falls desperately ill, six-year-old Julia is terrified but forbidden to speak of it. Her mother will get better, her father insists, if only she is left in peace. The dire prediction Julia hears in the schoolyard is, he declares, an ignorant lie.

As her mother slips away, Julia's sweet memories no longer seem real. Afterward, in the ancient maps she studies with her father, Julia searches for clues to a landscape forever altered. Who was her mother, and what does it mean to have had—and to have lost—her? Who is she, and how is she connected to her mother?

Mapping Eden has been called "wonderful and moving," "deeply touching and haunting," and "a gift to the reader."

The novel is an illuminating journey into the experience of grief and loss, and the devastating impact of the death of a parent in childhood. Set in Chicago, it's a delicately wrought story of one child that sheds light on the experience of childhood bereavement, the lasting impact of children's grief, and the search of a motherless daughter for her identity as a woman.