The Glass Sentence Published by Penguin on June 16, 2015 Genres: Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / Pirates, Juvenile Fiction / Fantasy & Magic, Juvenile Fiction / Historical / United States / 19th Century
Pages: 528
Find the Author: Website, Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon
Goodreads
For fans of The Golden Compass, this New York Times bestseller will take you on a fantastic journey across worlds and time.
Boston, 1891. Sophia Tims comes from a family of explorers and cartologers who, for generations, have been traveling and mapping the New World—a world changed by the Great Disruption of 1799, when all the continents were flung into different time periods. Eight years ago, Sophia's parents left her with her uncle Shadrack, the foremost cartologer in Boston, and went on an urgent mission. They never returned.Then Shadrack is kidnapped. Sophia must search for him with the help of Theo, a refugee from the West. Together they travel over rough terrain and uncharted ocean, encounter pirates and traders, and rely on a combination of Shadrack’s maps, common sense, and Sophia's unusual powers of observation. Little do they know that their lives are in as much danger as Shadrack's.
A New York Times Bestseller!
“I am in no doubt about the energy of S.E. Grove as a full-fledged, pathfinding fantasist. I look forward to the next installment to place upon the pile. Intensely.”—Gregory Maguire, The New York Times Book Review
* “Wholly original and marvelous beyond compare.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Review:
The prompt for June for the Unread Shelf project is to explore, and I thought about it a bit about which book I had that would take me on an adventure. The Map Makers trilogy fills that for me, as I have read the first two books but not the final one. So I have them all cued up on my audible. Exploration usually means using a map to get somewhere, and that is what you get with this series. You don’t get just normal maps, though; Grove gives us maps made out of various elements, and different things activate them. The most interesting one is the Carta Mayor, the map to the end of all maps, the map of the entire world as it has been, is and could be.
I would recommend this book to anyone; its creative, innovative, and exciting characters offer an adventure for everyone.
About S.E. Grove
My first book was a work of unapologetic plagiarism. I must have been about six, and I loved a children’s book (which I still have) about a mouse named Molly who prowled around a department store when all the people had gone home.
The thing I loved most was that Molly, a cardboard figure on a ribbon, could move around the book as you turned the pages. I set out to create something just as wonderful… and almost exactly identical. (I think I managed to change the name of the mouse, but not much else.) So it is with writing, right? We aspire and we imitate.
From those inauspicious beginnings I went on to create works that were slightly more original but somewhat less compelling. The family favorite is “Sympathetic Seashells,” a mystery involving a group of kid detectives and walkie-talkies hidden inside conch shells. The drawing were rendered, if you can call it that, on an old 1980s Macintosh. Let me tell you, it was a piece of work! (And yes, thanks to my considerate/vengeful parents, I still have it.)
Well, maybe not too much has changed. I still draw inspiration from the work of other writers, I still love mysteries, and I still can’t draw. My work nowadays falls somewhere between fantasy and science fiction (I find the categories clumsy), and it is always inspired by history. I have studied history for many years, and work now as an academic historian. My focus is on colonial Latin America, so I am especially interested in questions of power, empire, and society. I’ve found that history and fiction work well together in my head. One encourages the other.
The books that shaped me most were the ones I read before I turned eighteen. I remember sitting between the bookshelves of my elementary school (in Clayton, Missouri) reading over and over again a version of The Wild Swans illustrated by Susan Jeffers. Later on, I remember devouring the books by Madeleine L’Engle, and then Ursula LeGuin. The words and images of these creators and many others oriented me in the world, suggesting the power of imagination, the importance of choice, and the broad reach of the discoverable world.
Happy reading!
