Other Maps by Rebecca Morris

Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann

Anna Leverett’s father is retiring, and Anna has flown home to Guelph from Costa Rica, where she had been travelling, to attend the retirement dinner at a local golf club. It is winter, a far cry from the beachfront cabin she had been staying in on the Central American coast. To top it off, she had to be pleasant to the stuffed-shirt friends of her parents. In her mid-twenties, Anna has been travelling for years, anything to avoid staying in Guelph, where memories are unpleasant, not the least because her contemporaries there still regard her as a drug-and-alcohol-addled slut. It is only for a couple of days, though, then she will be off again, this time to Paris.

By chance, though, she reconnects with Helen, who had been her best friend in high school until Anna dropped out, ten years earlier. When they meet, they talk about Anna’s many tattoos for a few minutes, but soon turn to a more tender subject: the New Year’s party at Oliver Sutton’s house. It was after that party that their friendship evaporated.

Anna has no memory of what happened at that party, but it was in its aftermath that her reputation fell into the gutter. The two decide to find out the truth and begin the long process of trying to remember who was there and attempting to contact them to learn the truth about what happened. Anna decides to stay in Guelph until she can find some answers, living in her parents’ house while they take a world tour. This is just as well, since her relationship with her parents is strained.

Helen, too, has issues. She was born with a facial birthmark she strives to keep hidden with makeup. Because of that birthmark, Helen is socially shy, most confident when she is at work where she works at a cosmetics counter, but otherwise resistant to going out to bars, unlike Anna.

As they ferret out people who were at the party and come to terms with what happened there, the bond between Anna and Helen becomes stronger, each helping the other make the transition to self-confidence.

Other Maps is the first novel by accomplished short-story writer Rebecca Morris, and it realistically and sensitively portrays the anxieties and intensity of being a twenty-something dealing with personal trauma and uneasy relationships. The central subject in this book is sexual abuse and how one comes to terms with being its victim. A delicate subject, but Morris handles it straightforwardly, without over-psychologizing. She successfully captures the quandary of the twenty-something: far from adolescence in one’s mind, but not far at all in age—wanting to feel mature, but still bearing the emotional weight of one’s teenage years.

In dealing directly and straightforwardly with teenage sexual abuse, Morris is trying not just to peel back the curtain of shame that drapes the victims, but also give strength of purpose to those victims in their efforts to come to terms with such all-together too frequent trauma. An important book on a very difficult subject.

Other Maps is published by Linda Leith Publishing.