Inspiring Young Readers
posted on 01 Mar 2026
The Map of Me by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Olga Shtonda
As a very young child I was always very comfortable with where I lived – I knew my house, the back yard, the garden and the immediate neighbourhood, which included the park that skirted around my road. However, the world beyond those boundaries always felt a little alien and threatening and I was always relieved to be back in territory I considered my home turf.
As I grew older, I wanted to know more about where my home was in relation to everything else and I found that maps could be a fantastic way of discovering just where in the world you were – and showing you that there was plenty more beyond the safe boundary that need not be so scary after all.
What I only discovered later in life was that while we have maps to help us locate ourself in space and place, we can also have maps that locate us in time and in relationships. Most of us carry those maps in our heads but it sometimes helps to get them down on paper so that we can stay on top of just who we are, where we’ve come from and even where we’re hoping to go.
And these are the very ideas that underpin Nicola Davies’ excellent new book, The Map of Me. When a young girl has to uproot from her comfortable, familiar home and neighbourhood and find a new home in an unfamiliar city, she finds herself anxious and a little frightened of the maze of unknown streets and buildings. To help her adjust, her mom draws a map of the neighbourhood for her but the little girl knew that this map was too small – it didn’t show where she’d come from and it didn’t have some important people on it, ‘Like Granny and Joe-Dog’.
And so her map grew until it filled a whole wall and soon her friends were adding things too:
“Now I knew where everything and everyone was, the distance between us seemed to shrink.”
But everything changes and soon Joe-Dog has died and favourite trees have been cut down – so a new map is needed, one her Dad staps in to provide. This is a map of the past, one which tells the little girl where she came from, how her parents met and where Joe-Dog fitted into the picture. And soon the girl and her friends are filling the map of the past with detail and it’s then only a small step to the creation of yet another map – the map of the future. And this map can be filled not just with this as they are or as they have been but with hope for what’s to come.
The story is beautifully illustrated by Olga Shtonda, an award-winning Ukrainian artist, who brings Nicola Davies’ words vividly to life.
Available now from Templar Books, you will be able to get a copy from your local independent bookshop – who will, of course, be happy to order it for you if they don’t have copies on their shelves.
Terry Potter
March 2026
