Blaine and I finally finished The Crimson Skew, the last book in S.E. Grove’s Mapmakers Trilogy. The novels are lengthy, and our read aloud time is limited, so we’ve been on this fantastical journey for a long time. Coming to the conclusion was bittersweet.

As I mentioned my review of the first book, The Glass Sentence, the premise of this trilogy is that the Great Disruption of 1799 flung the world’s continents into different historical periods. In the first book, we meet 13-year-old Sophia, a Boston resident and niece of a famous cartologist, and Theo, a refugee from the Baldlands with a mysterious past.

In the second book, The Golden Specific, Sophia and Theo are accidentally separated. Sophia travels to the Papal States (medieval Europe) in search of her missing parents. There she meets new allies, learns more about the Ages, and finds a new map. Meanwhile, Theo stays in 1892 Boston and attempts to discover who murdered the Prime Minister.

In The Crimson Skew, while Sophia continues her search for her parents, she and her friends must journey to the Eerie Sea to obtain a special memory map that may prevent a war between New Occident and the Indian Territories.

When we finished the book, Blaine commented: “It’s a good thing that memory maps aren’t real because you’d be obsessed with them. And you already take enough pictures of our vacations.” That’s quite true, but, all the same, I wish memory maps were real.

The publisher recommends this trilogy for fans of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and I agree. That reminds me. I should find my copy of The Golden Compass for Blaine…