Kit doesn’t understand why his family has been uprooted to a remote coastal village in the North. Why did they leave so suddenly, and why has his Dad not joined them? At Askfeld Farm Guesthouse, he meets an eclectic group of new neighbours and forms an unlikely friendship with Beth, who suffers from a chronic illness he does not understand. Kit learns that Beth, who cannot leave the guesthouse, … guesthouse, is trying to draw a map from memory that shows all her favourite childhood haunts.
Kit makes it his quest to help her remember by visiting places for her and hopes to solve the problems of the other guests along the way. But becoming a hero like the ones in his favourite books is trickier than it seems. Can Kit work out that the person who really needs his help is much closer to home?
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I received a free electronic copy of this warm family novel from Netgalley, Claire Wong, and Lion Fiction. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read A Map of the Sky of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. These characters are friends before the first quarter of the book is finished, and you ‘see’ this cold, rainy, windswept edge of England as seen through the eyes of Clare Wong with every page turned.
Claire Wong brings us a view of the modern world through the gaze of our precocious ‘Kit’. Many of the tidbits of information are culled from Kit’s journal, a new red binder bought especially for this journey, which he titled ‘The Intrepid Northern Adventures of Christopher Shackleton Fisher Age Eleven.’ The family Fisher, mother Catherine, older sister Juliet ‘Jules’ and their father had been preparing for a move from London to Askfeld, in the very northern edge of England on the North Sea, at the end of the school term. For reasons not shared with Kit, he, Juliet, and Catherine leave London a week early, necessitating a stay at a local bed and breakfast owned by Sean and Beth Garsdale as they await closing on their new home and the delivery of their household goods.
Perfectionist Juliet was able to take her final GCSE exams before they left London but waits impatiently for her scores. She spends most of her time on her phone, texting friends in London. When the wifi is out during most storms and rain, she looks to Kit for entertainment. Kit missed his class end-of-year party. He can live with that, but he really misses his Dad. His mom Catherine seems to be going overboard on the protective restrictions placed on Kit. He can only even go outdoors when accompanied by Catherine AND Jules. He’s eleven, already! And Catherine spends most of her time online with her company in London as she steers her replacement into filling her old job. Dad has had to stay in London and finish up some work and get set up to ‘work from home’ in the North and will join them later, a date postponed several times.
Other guests at the B&B are Bert Gawpin, an older University instructor, and avid birdwatcher, and Maddie Morley, a younger teacher who finds herself stalled on what she had thought to be a healing pilgrimage and who’s so hurt and angry her self-control is verging on non-existent. The owner’s wife Beth is very pregnant and suffering from a debilitating disease as well. Owner Sean and cook Nick are overworked and underpaid, with not enough hours in the day to get everything done. Kit determines that he can ‘fix’ the problems of his new acquaintances by following the examples set out by his comic book heroes, King Arthur, Robin Hood, etc. His first quest will be to assist artist Beth in her effort to make a map of all the wonderful places a child can enjoy in their little corner of the world, something she will be able to share with her baby when he/she is older. It is possible that Sean is not drugging Beth to make her sick, in which case he could help Sean too. He must distract Bert who is without any self-confidence after making a mess of a published paper, and get him involved with local birdwatching, which Bert loves. Kit tells Bert the albatross story gleaned from the finished corner Beth’s map and accompanies him without parental permission on a dry run to the area of the rumored previous sighting of an albatross. And Maddie is just heart-sick because she misses her learning disabled students, students she left when it was pointed out to her that she wasn’t capable of helping them. If he can get her started again on her pilgrimage perhaps he can help her find a better place in her heart. As for himself, he will be fine, when his Dad gets there. If his Dad gets there…