Monthly Archives: September 2022

It’s been some time since I’ve picked up a new picture book (alas, my boys are older) but I saw The Boy Who Loved Maps (written by Kari Allen and illustrated by G. Brian Karas) and could not resist. Like the protagonist here, a young mapmaker, I love maps in all the ways they spark imagination and wondering.

In this book, the Mapmaker is visited by a girl, who becomes his new friend, and she asks him to draw a map of a special place, and as the two dance around what the place is that she wants to see charted out  — she describes her place in ways that he can’t get down on a map —  they become closer as friends, and end up where their mapping has taken them: home.

And both end up making the map together.

It’s a lovely story, infused with the magic and dreaming of maps, and Allen, at the end, has provided lots of resources for young mapmakers to make their own maps, with ideas and definitions, and after noting the inspiration for the book came from her own son’s mapmaking adventures — “…getting lost in all the little details” — she asks the reader: Do you want to be a mapmaker, too?

Yes.

What about you?

Peace (and picture books),
Kevin