PAPER ROADS

Three months after her father's death, Nora Callahan (12) finds a sealed box containing seven hand-drawn maps of real American landscapes rendered as a fantasy kingdom, each with a note addressed to the daughter he hadn't met yet. She convinces her grandmother Eileen (71), who has early-stage memory loss, to drive with her to find every location. As they travel from Illinois to Iowa to Missouri to Minnesota, Eileen begins to recognize each place because she took Daniel there as a boy. At a gas station parking lot in Minnesota, Nora says out loud what she has not said in four months: that she is furious at her father for leaving. At the final location, a lake in northern Minnesota, Eileen tells Nora everything she remembers about the summer Daniel spent there at nine, and Nora writes it in the map margins as she speaks. They drive home. Nora draws the eighth map herself.