The Glass Sentence
A remarkable middle-grade debut that charts its own territory
Boston, 1891. 13-year-old Sophia Tims lives in a world torn to pieces by the Great Disruption of 1799, which flung the continents into different time periods. When she was five, her explorer parents left her with her adored uncle Shadrack, the foremost cartologer in Boston, and never returned. Sophia has learned to take care of herself. Then he is kidnapped. Sophia is the only one who can search for him; together with Theo, a refugee from the West, she sets off, relying on a combination of Shadrack’s maps, common sense, and her own slantwise powers of observation. But even as Sophia and Theo try to save Shadrack’s life, they are in danger of losing their own.
The Glass Sentence plunges readers into a place and time they will not want to leave, and introduces them to a hero and heroine they will take to their hearts. It is an extraordinary debut.
S. E. Grove
In her own words:
"My first book was a work of unapologetic plagiarism. I must have been about six, and I loved a children’s book (which I still have) about a mouse named Molly who prowled around a department store when all the people had gone home.
The thing I loved most was that Molly, a cardboard figure on a ribbon, could move around the book as you turned the pages. I set out to create something just as wonderful... and almost exactly identical. (I think I managed to change the name of the mouse, but not much else.) So it is with writing, right? We aspire and we imitate.
Mapmakers
Mapmakers consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.