Publisher: Berkley
Release Date: April 8, 2025
Reviewed by Nancy
Professor Elodie Tarrant is an expert in magic disasters. Nothing fazes her—except her own personal disaster, that is: Professor Gabriel Tarrant, the grumpy, unfriendly man she married for convenience a year ago, whom she secretly loves.Gabriel is also an expert in magic disasters. And nothing fazes him either—except the walking, talking tornado that is his wife. They’ve been estranged since shortly after their wedding day, but that hasn’t stopped him from stoically pining for her.
When magic erupts in a small Welsh village, threatening catastrophe for the rest of Britain, Elodie and Gabriel are accidentally both assigned to the case. With the fate of the country in their hands, they must come together as a team in the face of perilous conditions like explosions, domesticated goats, and only one bed. But this is easier said than done. After all, there's no navigational guide for the geography of the heart.
Nancy’s Thoughts:
The Geographer’s Map to Romance mixes a marriage of convenience, a second
chance at love, and a grumpy-sunshine pairing with a dose of humor, including a
sendup of the academic world. The result is a delightful book. It’s set in a Victorian
England where geography (earth science) includes dealing with magic, which is a force
of the land. Instead of ley lines, we have fey lines and magic forces measured by
thaumometers.
Elodie and Gabriel Tarrant are obviously still attracted to each other, possibly even
obsessed with each other, but neither thinks the other reciprocates their feelings. As a
result they spend a lot of time trying to dodge each other and to convince themselves
they don’t feel what they plainly do. Elodie is imaginative and poetic and sees the joy in
everything. Gabriel is serious, careful, and determined to remain grounded. He’s so
stern with his students that they’ve nicknamed him Professor Tyrant.
The pair and their assistants, along with a cost-conscious fellow from the Home Office,
arrive in Wales to discover that wild magic is levitating animals, starting fires, and
transforming people and objects into plants, animals and birds. The situation escalates
as they investigate, and the combination of danger and proximity brings their feelings for
each other to the fore. For example:
He took a step closer to her. She tossed back a loose strand of hair and stared him
down (or, more accurately, up, since he was some four inches taller). The air between
them crackled with a magic considerably more potent than that which was exploding
pebbles on the road beyond.
But they both carry on trying to ignore their emotions until the situation reaches a point
where that’s impossible.
One of the things I most enjoyed about the book is Holton’s wry narrative voice. I also
enjoyed her use of internal language, sometimes with strike-throughs, to show the
feelings Elodie and Gabriel are trying to suppress. In Chapter One, they meet at the
train station, having both been dispatched to deal with the magical emergency, each
unaware the other is involved until they meet at the train station. Elodie responds this
way:
Approaching him was the hardest thing she’d done in a long while, and this was coming
from a woman with a doctorate that had required extensive knowledge of trigonometry.
She hated the coldhearted, unforgiving man. Absolutely, completely loved—wait, no,
loathed him. Arriving at his side on the platform, she offered a terse yet completely
polite greeting.
But Gabriel went on staring at the block in his hand, such a calm, somber beauty to his
face that it made Elodie’s throat ache. Ache like I’ve just swallowed poison, she
amended furiously.
That wry internal narrative also supplies humor. When a tourist drawn to the magical
mayhem in Wales blathers about the excitement of magic, Gabriel has this reaction:
Bloody hell. The fellow was either an incoherent lunatic or a humanities student.
(Gabriel did not always find it easy to spot the difference.)
Then there’s this:
“What about free will?” Elodie argued, setting her hands on her hips.
“What about it?” Gabriel asked, as if free will was something he, as a university
professor, simply could not countenance.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll note that I have a degree in history, grew up in a
college town, and am married to an academic. The wry references to academia are not
mean-spirited or unkind and fit the characters’ personalities.)
The supporting characters include a professor who’s supposed to deal with magical
disasters but has a knack for causing them, as when he took his class to see what he
thought were singing stalactites but were really razor-sharp, spinning stalactites. Yet
he’s likeable because he’s always willing to pitch in and do his part.
The silliness of the tourists who’ve come to see the magical disaster is so like the
onlookers who rush to see disasters today that it works extremely well in context. The
cowardice of the man from the Home Office contrasts nicely with Elodie and Gabriel’s
determination. And the villagers’ desire to capitalize on this opportunity is not only
understandable, though it’s inconvenient for Elodie and Gabriel, but often humorous.
The romantic arc progresses in a believable and satisfying way, with the magical
disaster woven through it instead of occurring parallel to it.
The worldbuilding is original, cohesive, and well explained.
By this point, readers may be wondering why, if I liked so much about this book, I gave it
4 stars instead of five. It’s because there’s one part of it that bothered me a lot. The
romantic conflict, the marital problem that sent Elodie and Gabriel in opposite directions
a year before the story starts, is based on a misunderstanding of a comment—a true
comment—that five minutes of conversation could have resolved. Yet neither pursued it.
Near the end of the book, we see Elodie developing insight into Gabriel’s personality
that leads her to look differently at that misunderstanding. He’s gaining similar
understanding of her. Those bits are written very well, with the story leading up to them
nicely. In order for me to buy that misunderstanding as the book’s main romantic
conflict, though, I needed their internal reactions in the moment the breach occurred (a
moment the story includes as a flashback) to know why they didn’t pursue that
conversation, and they aren’t there.
The relationship conflict is central to a romance, and when one doesn’t work for me, it
has to affect the way I rate the book. A lot depends on how much I enjoyed it otherwise.
Would I keep reading the book if I hadn’t committed to review it? How much did I enjoy
it apart from my issue with the conflict? In this case, I would have kept reading and
enjoyed the overall story immensely. So it gets four stars, and I highly recommend.
~Nancy
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