Through the frame of old maps, Mapping Eden traces a young girl's quest to make sense of the world and the event that transforms it--the death of her mother. In the sunroom with the grand piano, on the stoop of their apartment building, and in the ancient maps she studies with her father, Julia senses absence. She can no longer remember the music they said her mother used to play. Sometimes she isn't sure her mother had been there. She knows "she wasn't there still." In the visions, earnest and fanciful, of long-ago cartographers Julia searches for "a sign, a proof" of "the where and why." As an adult she reflects on who she is, and how she is connected to her mother.