The Map of the Sky by Félix J. Palma

Summary from GoodReads:

A love story serves as backdrop for The Map of the Sky when New York socialite Emma Harlow agrees to marry millionaire Montgomery Gilmore, but only if he accepts her audacious challenge: to reproduce the extraterrestrial invasion featured in Wells’s War of the Worlds. What follows are three brilliantly interconnected plots to create a breathtaking tale of time travel and mystery, replete with cameos by a young Edgar Allan Poe, and Captain Shackleton and Charles Winslow from The Map of Time.

My Review:

I am completely in love with this series. Felix J. Palma is my hero. Seriously. I loved The Map of Time (which deals with H.G. Well’s Time Machine) – so it was inevitable that I picked up The Map of the Sky with anticipation, and thoroughly expecting a story that dealt with Wells’s sky-themed book like.. say.. War of the Worlds.

People, I cackled out loud several times as I read this story.

Something I’ve learned to appreciate, over the last year especially, is how a narrator can make or break a story. If you, as a writer, choose to write in the first person and the character you have speaking is unlikable or annoying in any way, the narration is going to get on the nerves of your readers. If you choose third-person and that intimate moment crops up when we need to be in the head of the character, then you’ve made a blunder there as well.

Then there are geniuses like Felix J. Palma who give us a third-person narrator who is a character in his own right. This book is like having Palma’s voice in our heads, enjoying the story right there along with us, and guessing (correctly in my case) what are reactions will be and then calling them out in the text itself. It was downright spooky at times – but a good spooky!

I knew from The Map of Time that I could expect another story intricate in its weaving, and filled with misdirection. But even knowing all of that, the misdirection was not easy to spot, and when I did spot it, I fully expect that Palma intended it to happen at that time because just a page later it was brought to light so matter-of-factly I felt foolish for feeling a bit jubilant.

I am not going to talk about the plot, other than to tell you that in three distinct sections, Palma writes such a complete story that is committed to all of the details, that even if you are dying for the answers, it’s impossible to not thoroughly enjoy the ride in getting to them.

This book was fun, pure and simple, and I am loving that the covers were flashy enough to catch my eye and make me pull them off the shelf.

Don’t just take my word for it! Check out what these bloggers say!

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