A Map of Everything

by Elizabeth Earley, Christa Donner (Illustrator)

Anne’s sister, a bright and lovely teenager, sustains a traumatic brain injury after a near-fatal car accident. As a result, Anne and her siblings and parents are thrown into a decades-long struggle for belonging, deliverance and redemption — with surprising results. A MAP OF EVERYTHING intimately explores the fragile nature of family dynamics, revealing what is salvaged, what is lost, and what is gained after a tragedy hits home.

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 2014

About the author

Elizabeth Earley is the author of two novels, A Map of Everything, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Like Wings, Your Hands, which won the Women's Prose Prize at Red Hen Press (judged by Aimee Bender). Earley holds a BA in Creative Writing and an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Time Out Magazine, The Chicago Reader, Geek Magazine, Outside Magazine, Gnome Magazine, Hyper Text Magazine, The Windy City Times, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The First Line Magazine, Fugue, Hair Trigger, Role/Reboot, Ms. Fit Magazine, Hoot, and other publications. Earley won the David Friedman Memorial Prize for fiction, was a finalist for the 2011 Able Muse Write Prize for Fiction and for the Bakeless Literary Prize for Fiction. She is also an editor at Jaded Ibis Press.

Reviews

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I marked this book as "currently reading" I had a moment of panic; what if I only think it is 4 stars, or less, how will I handle that since I know and like the author? Fortunately, my worry was unnecessary. This book is gorgeously written. I was drawn in immediately, the characters are well developed and I greatly enjoyed spending time with them. When I began reading I had no idea that the novel is a story of family, tragedy, love, heartache and addiction - all of my favorite topics. I especially appreciated that Anne happens to have relationships with women and, unlike most every other novel with a lesbian character, her love for women is not an issue to be struggled with or agonized over. I am glad to have read this book and highly recommend. I look forward to your next book EE!

[Flannery · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Map of Everything. "A Map of Everything" managed to cross borders in how I normally understand Life from a Nurses' perspective. The voice in this book is clear as a bell, describing how the House of Cards fell in a young, beautiful girl's Life. One distraction became the Thief that stole all that she took for granted.
It's poignant. It's true. It could have happened to any of us and makes us question if we would have had the guts to go on. Don't speculate, though. you will be pleasantly surprised. No spoilers.

[Rosalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, harrowing novel about one family’s response to tragedy. I especially admire the author’s decision to tell the story in a nonlinear way, moving back and forth in time, using a variety of narrative perspectives and techniques, and occasionally also respectfully exploring the visionary experiences of both June, the injured family member, during (and after) her coma, and Anne, her deeply grieving younger sister. The author uses the elements of the periodic tables as headings for her sections; for me, this evokes the fragmenting of the family members’ lives (matter broken down into its constituent parts), but also evoking the Big Bang’s scattering, outward trajectory, with the underlying message that what seems to be destruction or upheaval on a massive scale can coalesce into a new creation, or in the case of this family, a new normal.

[Carly Israel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stop what you are doing and order this book. And then order her next book. Elizabeth is sharp and wise with her words and paints pictures with her prose.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is very patchy. The first 100 pages or so are quite promising, but from there it rapidly descends into pretension and self-indulgence, at times even incoherence. On the strength of the first 100 pages, I persisted with it, hoping it would return to form or at least that some resolution would justify the rambling incoherence of the middle, but sadly it just got worse and worse. The final 50 pages reached new lows, including what might possibly have been typos, but I suspect were actually confusions of language – e.g. ‘choral’ repeatedly used instead of ‘coral’, ‘alas’ used when she must have meant ‘at last’ – but that really should have been picked up in editing and/or proofing. Much of the book reads like a quick and dirty first draft or perhaps a compilation of diary entries that have been roughly cut and pasted together, and which is in deep need of assiduous editing. The oddly infrequent magical realist sections add nothing, merely repeating what was conveyed in the preceding chapter, and it seems they were included out of either indecision about whether to include the realist or magical version, or perhaps to better justify the book’s classification as ‘literary fiction’. Similarly, the intermittent volcano references seem to have no reason for being other than to claim a ‘literary’ classification. The affectation of the periodic table arrangement (where each section is labelled an element, working through systematically from 1: hydrogen to 118: ununoctium) seems pointless – the characteristics of the elements do not appear to relate to the content of the sections at all, and the explanation given for this arrangement in the concluding chapter is unsatisfying. Overall, the book goes nowhere and none of the characters are in any way likeable or interesting. The character arc of the main narrator was pretty unsatisfactory to me – she seems to bounce, pinball-like, from crisis to crisis with no insight at all as to what is really going on inside her. Once again, the resolution offered at the end is unsatisfactory and built on shallow reflections with no real insight. Parts of the prose are interesting, but others are clumsy (e.g. ‘Finally, after time was a glue-filled wade pool, stretched and slowed to an agonizing degree, we crossed over to the train station to await out transport back’ – what?). I think the author has been let down by a lack of editorial assistance. I suspect she has a good novel in her somewhere, but this isn’t it.

[Amy Withnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Map of Everything is literally what it says on the tin (or the book cover in this case), it is a map (or a novel) about everything: love, tragedy, despair, complex family, and personal, relationships and personal transformation. The story follows a family through their up’s & down’s, good times & bad after one very wet day changed their lives forever.

We are told this story by Anne, the youngest child, the “fifth-born” who is hit hard by what has happened to her sister June. Anne was just a young girl when the accident happened & through this story we see how he coped as a young child, how it affected her when she hit her teens and on onto adulthood. Anne also tells us, through stories & anecdotes, how the rest of her family were affected by & coped with what happened.

By the end of the novel I felt like I knew Anne very well, I’d watched her grow from a young troublesome teenager into a very well-rounded woman. At times I actually felt like I was living Anne’s life right alongside her: I felt her pain, her sadness, her joy.

An exceptionally well written novel that I would recommend to anyone. Elizabeth Earley draws us into the story & makes us feel everything the characters are feeling, near the end of the book we are rooting for this family we know so well, we want everything to work out because god-knows they deserve it.

[Rhonda Cutler · Rating 5 out of 5]

June, beautiful, popular, and spirited, was idolized and adored by her younger sister, the narrator of this compelling tale. Then on a dark, rainy night, June's decision to take the car out, and not buckle her seatbelt, would change the course of her life. Her brain damage is so profound that the reader is left wondering the almost unthinkable, whether the fact of her survival not so much a blessing as a curse. The structure of Earley's book is innovative, moving backward and forward in time, changing points of view, but this shift in narrative voice is never confusing rather underscores the impact of June's accident has on the lives of those around her. It brutally describes the grief-stricken early days after her accident. While June might be the only family member who suffers physical damage, the entire family suffers psychically. Earley is especially skillful in exploring the individual family members efforts to cope with their cauldron of emotions, grief, resentment, guilt - rational or not, and move on to a place where June's accident is no longer the central fact of their existence, quashing their ability to live their own lives to the fullest.

[MJ Halberstadt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm aware that I'm a minority here because most people seem to have a super visceral response to this one. I can appreciate that each moment is beautiful stand-alone, and Earley sure can spin a poetic metaphor! Where the novel lost me is in its disjointedness- I'd argue that the non-linear storytelling doesn't quite come together for me, and is inconsistent in its inconsistency. By the end, the several story threads make way for one culminating thread that, for me, is more a reflection of the fact that these characters have grown older together, and less a satisfying result of any character arc. Earley also unsuccessfully attempts to wrestle in her protagonist's romantic life which arrives like an after-thought to the central thrust and never REALLY integrates to the story she's trying to tell.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this. The writing was beautiful, and I think the author does a good job of conveying what she set out to do, which is the way a tragic event can affect a family over twenty years. But the breadth, in both time and characters, meant that the story never had that much depth to it. I never had a clear sense of what June was like as an adult, or even Anne, the narrator, and I was never in suspense about the plot except in the very beginning when June's accident and coma were first introduced. Some of the other siblings were mentioned so rarely that I wondered why they were in the story. I wonder how much of it is autobiographical, as this is often the case when an author puts in details that seem to have no significance (like the fact that Anne and June had two different dads).

[Shayna Sobol · Rating 2 out of 5]

My rating has nothing to do with the writing, which is quite good, but rather with the story, which is so sad and depressing it was a struggle to finish.