The Mapmakers’ Race

The Mapmakers' Race by Eirlys Hunter is a big outdoor adventure for 9 year olds about a family who lose their mother at a railway station and enter a mountain race anyway.

What happens

It really isn't Joe's fault. He got off to fill the water flask, the railway man told him the train would stop for eleven minutes, and he was back with two whole minutes to spare. By then Ma had gone looking for him, and the train pulled out with the children on board and their mother on the platform.

The next train is in a week. The race starts tomorrow.

So the Santanders arrive at Grand Prospect with a tent, a parrot called Carrot, sacks of food and no adult at all. Twenty-eight days to survey the best way over the mountains for a railway, across country nobody has charted, against five teams of grown professionals who are already looking at them the way you'd look at something on the sole of your boot.

They can't walk away from it. Their father went on an expedition and never came home, their mother spent the last of the savings on the entry fee, and the prize money is the only thing standing between this family and being split up.

Each of them is good at one thing, which I loved. Sal does the maths and does the worrying. Joe finds the route. Francie never speaks and draws instead, and her twin says her thoughts out loud for her. Humphrey is four and mostly wants his dinner.

It's an old-fashioned adventure in the best possible way. There's a train that climbs a cliff at sixty-seven degrees, with the seats tipped back like a dentist's chair. There are bears and bees and river crossings. The children make proper decisions about rope and rations and where to camp, and they get some of them wrong.

The bit that really lands is the adults. The Cowboy who spits tobacco at Sal's feet and calls her girly. The mayor's assistant who looks at them like something nasty. The sheer work of being taken seriously when you are eleven and suddenly in charge of everyone.

There is a quieter thing running underneath it all. Their father's disappearance is never tidied away. Joe avoids thinking about him because it leaves an ache in his middle. For a reader carrying a loss of their own, that may land harder than the bears do.

What to read next

If they want another child with a map and a father who vanished at sea, Tamzin Merchant's The Mapmakers has Cordelia searching London by starlight for a route only the North Star will show her.