The Mapmaker’s Daughter

by Clare Marchant

In The Mapmaker’s Daughter, the reader will find:

1. A successfully handled dual timeline
2. Two women who love their men
3. Two men who love the sea and adventure
4. Some history concerning the control of England
5. Settings of time: 1569, 1580, and 2022
6. Settings of place: Amsterdam, Low Countries; Hay-on-Wye, Wales; London, England
7. Filth and dangers of the cities
8. Persecution of Protestant Huguenots by Spanish Catholics
9. Cartography, engraving, map shops
10. Queen Elizabeth’s court and appropriate dress and protocol
11. The place and function of women
12. Sea battles
13. The knighting of Francis Drake

This work of historical fiction focuses on Freida, a woman from a family of cartographers. She survives a massacre as a child, but finds herself in similar circumstances as a mother. She becomes uncomfortably entangled with Queen Elizabeth’s court where her husband, a dashing privateer, is not welcome. Moving forward to our century, the protagonist is Robyn who has been studiously avoiding the declaration of her husband’s death for seven years. The Mapmaker’s Daughter will reveal how their stories intertwine.

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Rating: 4/5

Category: General Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women’s Fiction

Notes: 1. I was interested in reading information in general on what was fact and what was fiction. There was nothing that addressed this in my Advanced Reader Copy.
2. I find the many references to clothing quite interesting and scurried to the Internet on multiple occasions to look up words like “kirtle” to more fully understand the garb of the time.

Publication: September 1, 2022—Avon Book, UK

Memorable Lines:

The queen may be the bee at the centre of the hive, but she was still harbouring enemies within.

What filled her inside, always there, twisting her guts and suffocating her, was the anger that Nate had chosen such a dangerous career, that he had opted to race a yacht sometimes in perilous, risky waters, which had ultimately taken him from her.

The temporary confidence she’d arrived with drained through her body to her feet and disappeared into a puddle on the floor. Other guests pushed around her until she felt like a piece of flotsam being dragged back and forth on the dark waves of the sea she’d recently sailed upon.