Love Maps

By Eliza Factor

"Powerfully written....Factor reveals this arresting tale through solid character development and a well-paced narrative. From its tense opening chapter to its memorable conclusion, this is a read-in-one-sitting trip."
--Publishers Weekly

"Compelling...a poignant picture of familial and romantic love and their complexities."
--Library Journal

One of The L Magazine's 50 Books You’ll Want to Read This Spring and Summer

"Memorable and touching...a commendable achievement that captures the interrelation of fear and love in the unbalanced reality of modern adulthood."
--San Francisco Book Review

"Entertaining and suspenseful."
--Coal Hill Review

"A quick and absorbing read that deals with love, relationships, and art and I highly recommend this brief yet intense novel."
--The Book Binder’s Daughter

"[Factor] creates vibrant characters who struggle against love."
--A New Day

"Who can plot the turns and reversals of the heart? Who can follow its illogical loyalties and mysterious obsessions? Who can reconcile its competing claims from lovers and family? Eliza Factor, that's who, in this stunningly assured novel about a pair of sisters--one a successful artist, the other a famous singer--and the handsome architect who comes between them. The cover should come with a warning to put your life on hold for a few days, because once you pick it up, you won't be able to do anything else until you finish."
--Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets

"Eliza Factor's second novel is a beautiful and uplifting journey through the New York art scene of the 1980s, as lived by one true artist. You'll be hard-pressed to find a character more fully and honestly revealed across the pages of a book than Sarah Marker. A stunning and original exploration of family, romantic love, and the possibility of healing."
--Joseph Weisberg, creator/executive producer of The Americans (FX Network)

"By turns lyrical and flinty, searching and suspenseful, Love Maps is animated by the strivings and travails of characters who seek (and find) the real and the true, the territory instead of the map."
--Thad Ziolkowski, author of Wichita

The love in Love Maps is not the kind associated with domestic bliss; it is the kind that bubbles up at inopportune moments, attaching itself to people who might be better off free, causing mayhem and longing, along with moments of rare beauty. The title is taken from a series of paintings by Sarah Marker, an artist who ekes out a living teaching humanities at a fancy high school in Connecticut.

The story begins when Sarah receives a letter from Philip, her erstwhile husband. They have lived separately for seven years, without having seen each other once, without having formally severed ties, in a state of sustained ambivalence. Now he wants to visit. As much as Sarah would like to see him, she is terrified at what he will do when he discovers that he has a son.

Sarah bundles up her son and once again takes flight, only to arrive in a place she had not intended. While navigating the terrain of the 1980s art scene in New York City, she must confront the terrible events surrounding Philip's departure, and reconcile the expectations of domestic life with her own fractured experience of family, confronting the violence and aching love at the heart of this story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Release date: Apr 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781617753633

Reviews for Love Maps

[tammychristine · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I won this book from Librarything Early Reviewers club. I thought I would like it because it was set in the 80's. I forgot how pretentious and boring I found the art scene in the actual 80's. I could not get into this book and didn't finish.

[mizpurplest · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully, almost painfully wonderful. The characters are Adobe and enticing, even at their darkest, and the story pulls you along through every stage, in spite of the split storyline. I loved it all, especially the enigmatic ending.

[katharineclifton · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps it takes a deeper, more literary mind than mine to appreciate what the author has done here. I found almost every single part of this book unbelievable. The plot was so bizarre and convoluted, that I was taken out of it. The characters were caricatures. Just when I thought a storyline or character had potential, they were a non-entity. And then we got explanation of characters who ultimately didn't matter. I also didn't care for a single character. Not even Sarah or her son. There was possibility here, but the whole thing just felt too scattered and over the top. I didn't mind the construct of bouncing back and forth between the present (1997) and the 1980s, it was interesting, but the plot was scattered. The introduction of random characters or plot lines did nothing to drive the story when they were ultimately abandoned. Even the concept of the Love Maps for which the book was named fell short for me. It felt tacked on, not fully integrated. I don't know what else to say. The author is clearly a talented writer. But.... I didn't enjoy this book. It felt like it was trying to hard to be something, but it had no idea what it wanted to be. Though maybe that's just a metaphor for the main character...

[debristow · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers program. I really wanted to love this book. I usually love books with short chapters, easy to read, and those that take the reader on the journey from past and present. And although the story alternated from past and present, I found it very confusing and hard to follow. The short chapters didn't provide enough to get involved with the characters and their stories. I didn't really enjoy the book until about three quarters of the way until the end and by that time, it just wasn't "enough".

[bleached_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took me longer than expected to really sink into the characters and chapters of Love Maps. Eventually, the complex struggle of Sarah's life drew me in as she attempted to balance being a sister and wife in the past and a mother in the present. Some parts were a bit unbelievable but the self-realization story deep underneath was what kept me turning pages. As her sister shows herself to be a vicious, self-absorbed villain and her husband becomes a self-pitying, defeatist, Sarah is left to find herself which we start to see at the very end.

[jenxy21 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I won Love Maps as an early review copy here on LibraryThing. Factor's tale of 1980s New York gives an interesting view of life as an artist. The main character, Sarah Marker, is quirky and instinctive-exactly how I see creative minds. The psychological rendering of love reads like it feels-exciting, terrifying, and amazingly real. Good read!

[readhanded · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting story of love in 1980s New York City. The novel is formatted as a flashbacks interspersed with present events. Love Maps is a quick read, but when I finished, I really wished the book had had more substance - more character development, and a bit more plot at the end to tie things together a little better.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There are many different types of love: familial, romantic, and parental to name but a few. To love someone is to go on a journey with them. You can see where you have been together but you can never know where the journey leads, what terrain you may pass through, how long you will journey together, or where your ultimate destination, whether together or separate, is. Each of us has our own unique love map, imprinted on our hearts, that tells the story of who we are and how we've loved. In Eliza Factor's novel, Love Maps, main character Sarah Marker, an artist, paints actual love maps for people based on the stories they tell her, but even the artist can't know the as yet uncharted places on her own map.When the story opens, Sarah finds a letter from Philip, the father of her seven year old son Max. She and Philip are estranged and she never told him that he had a child. Now it looks like he's about to reappear in her comfortable life. Quickly the narrative flips back more than 15 years to the time just prior to Sarah and Philip's meeting, when she is determined to go to the funeral of an old family friend. Maya, Sarah's older sister,a successful businesswoman and former singing sensation who has an outsized presence in Sarah's life thinks that Sarah should not go. But Sarah feels she must. And that one decision leads to so many others that change the trajectory of her life forever.Alternating between the art scene in New York in the 1980s and suburbia in the late 1990s, the dual story lines flip back and forth in short chapter bursts. The past unfolds the sisterly, almost proprietary, relationship between Sarah and Maya, the advent of Philip and Sarah's growing feelings for him, and the way that these two competing relationships tug and tear at her. Maya is a character that inspires her sister's hypnotic devotion and she keeps Sarah firmly in her orbit by holding her selfishly tight, demanding her own way. Sarah can stretch this bond to allow for Philip's presence in her life, but she can't or won't break it. As her life gets more complicated and fraught, her art and talent are finding expression in her paintings in a world ready to appreciate them. Sarah is a seemingly free spirited character who is nevertheless tied to her past and the expectation of always suiting her sister, even to the exclusion of the man she loves. But she learns the hard way that being placatory to everyone doesn't work. Her fear of the past is clear in her reactions to hearing that Philip plans to arrive on her doorstep a mere day away and she must reflect on her journey to where she is as she anticipates the upheaval his reappearance would surely cause. The question is whether she will have the courage to allow him to reappear. Philip's character is much more opaque, driven as it is by his love for Sarah and his uncanny dislike for and refusal to be charmed by Maya.The novel is quite slow to start and almost immediately a barrage of characters comes at the reader from two different time periods, complicating the reading. But once the story settles into the two plot lines, the reading gets easier. The writing is intelligent and well done although certain of the characters are undeniably unlikable. Because of the brevity of the novel, some of the relationships and motivations have to just be accepted instead of feeling organically true. As a story of love and relationship, the novel is quite interesting as it reflects the symbolism of Sarah's Love Map paintings, showing the reader where Sarah has been but not showing, not knowing, where she'll go. It is ultimately as unresolved as life but it is also an incisive, if frustrating, look at relationship, a brief glimpse into the art world, and a reflection on mistakes and how to acknowledge and grow past them.

[reb922 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sarah has not seen and rarely heard from her husband Phillip in over 7 years. On day she receives a letter from Africa from Phillip saying he wants to see her and will be showing up at the train station the next day. Alternating between 1997 prior to his arrival and the mid/late 1980's in NYC we see how Sarah and Phillip met and what drove them apart. I liked the writing and the shift in time frame that kept me turning the page. This was completely different from Factor's first novel and I am interested to see what she writes next.