The Mapmakers

Tamzin Merchant's The Mapmakers is a magical London adventure for 9 year olds about a girl searching the city by starlight for the place her father's map points to.

What happens

Cordelia Hatmaker's father went down with his ship two months ago. Everyone in the house has accepted it. Cordelia hasn't.

What she has is a piece of paper that looked blank until she worked out it was drawn in ink you can only read by starlight. So every clear night she slips out of Hatmaker House and walks the Thames with it, hunting for a circus with eight roads leading off it and a little drawing of the North Wind puffing out his cheeks.

There's a riddle round the edge about a sign called the Rose and Sea, and a fast river running secretly beneath. She has tried the Rose and Crown. She has been shooed away from a chocolate house called the Rambling Rose. Nothing fits.

Chapter one is rougher than you might expect. A drunk sailor grabs her on the quay, cuts the chain of her necklace with a short knife, then dangles her out over the black water by that chain until she gets free by yanking his beard. Exciting rather than gory, and she wins. But it's a real knife and she's eleven, so have a look first if your reader is jumpy.

After that it settles into what it's really about, which is a family of Makers and a house where magic behaves like a craft.

Great-aunt Petronella distils Essence of Joy out of yesterday's rainwater, then dabs a bit behind her ears like perfume. Soft rain gives a gentle joy. Hard rain gives a fiercer one. Come winter they'll be working with snowflakes (a single snowflake holds a surprising quantity of wonder).

That's the flavour of the whole thing. Ingredients, not spells.

Sam Lightfinger is the best company in it. She used to live on the streets, she flatly refuses to wear a dress, she's learning her letters with her tongue sticking out, and she hears Cordelia creeping back in every single time.

What to read next

Before this one comes the first Hatmakers book, also in the library. That one starts on a lightning-struck night, with somebody hammering on the door of Hatmaker House and Cordelia running down five floors certain it's her father.