"The Last Mapmaker" by Christina Soontornvat

I feel like if the author had played the ending straight, this could have been quite a good book instead of a merely okay one.

Let me explain. No; that would take too long. Let me sum up.

The main character, Sai, is basically on a quest to make something of herself. She's the assistant to a mapmaker, who's going on an exploration mission, and he needs her to come along. So she does. It helps that if the exploration ship discovers what it's trying to discover, everyone on it will be rewarded with their choice of a bunch of money or five links of a lineal (these jewelry-chain things that denote status in the book's fictional country, with one link per cool ancestor you can trace in your lineage). And since Sai's only known ancestor is her dad, who is a low-down snake-in-the-grass kind of guy, she really wants that lineal.

The ship discovers what it's trying to discover. The good guys make it back home relatively safely. |Sai takes the bunch of money as her reward because she's apparently decided she doesn't want the lineal, and she and her mentor pass off the newly-discovered land as not being all it's cracked up to be even though it actually is all it's cracked up to be|.

Now, the second one I can understand. While it does smack slightly of "oh noooo keep people from finding the cool place because they'll destroy teh enviornment niuuoooo!", people had expressed doubts about |the mystery continent|'s very existence for the entire book, and so passing it off as just a barren volcanic wasteland felt at least plausible. And that one didn't come out of nowhere; it had been foreshadowed a bit throughout the story.

But the first one? Nope. If the author had built the story up as a "maybe this society is deeply flawed and we should probably take a good long look to see if we might be living in a dystopia here" story, Sai's decision to |not take the lineal| would have made sense with the way the story was going. But until the very end, it was built as a "this society is mostly fine and we should do the best we can within it" story. The end decision just felt out-of-the-blue and out of character.

But hey, other than that, the content was fine! Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some mild violence and one guy who repeatedly says what are assumed to be in-universe foreign swearwords.

Because of the disconnect between the ending and the rest of the story, I'm only giving this one 3 stars. Other than that, it was good, but the ending... it's just off.

(Endnote: The title is kind of misleading here. There will be other mapmakers after Sai's gone, she isn't the end of all mapmaking tradition. Honestly, I'm not sure what the "The Last" part of the title is about; "Mapmaker" is spot on, though.)