*Excited! My review made it onto Library Reads November 2013 list. http://libraryreads.org/november-2013-libraryreads-list/

"Angus walked down to the end of the wharf and felt a release that filled the sky. Beauty had not abandoned him. He'd abandoned it. On the battlefield he'd risked life in the midst of death. And he had not risked it since. He closed his eyes and let the stars fall around him."

Angus MacGrath is caught between the artist he longs to be and the sailor his father believes is more fitting for a man supporting a family on the coast of Nova Scotia. When Angus’ brother-in-law Ebbin disappears during World War I and his wife mentally begins to disappear he enlists with the promise of a safe cartographer’s job in London. Away from any actual fighting, he will be able to search for Ebbin. Instead, Angus is thrust into the front lines of battle in France. He finds himself an officer and changing in ways he never imagined in a world where death is expected and surviving is a surprise.

On the home front, Angus’ son Simon Peter also struggles to find who he will become as he tries to understand his pacifist grandfather, emotionally vacant mother and a country caught in the patriotic fever that only something as unknown and distant as a war across the sea could create. The cost of loyalty, the ugly face of prejudice and the hell war brings to both the soldiers on the front line and those who wait anxiously back home weaves a never sentimental but very soulful story.

I have been struggling to write this annotation not trusting how to put the experience of this book into words. The research done is incredible. To say the words are beautiful seems wrong to say in a book that gives you vivid descriptions of war, the life in the trenches experienced and also the juxtaposition of the beauty of Nova Scotia. The emotional havoc is palpable but the story line rarely goes where you expect it. The characters are well-drawn and so flawed that they linger in your head after finishing. Life changes in the blink of an eye and Duffy does a masterful job of letting the reader watch everyone desperately trying to catch up.

All these words to say, I did not want this book to end.

As one may deduce from my two star rating, I didn't like this book very much.

I am a member of two book clubs. About three months ago, we chose this The Cartographer of No Man's Land. I usually enjoy the the books our librarian/BookClub leader chooses; some more than others. This book was the first I didn't finish. I started I several times and got to about page 30 before I just stopped reading.

As my other book club is in the same county library system, No Man's Land appeared again. As so many of the members of the first club, and GoodReads members, loved the book, I was determined to find out what they loved so much. I didn't.

To be totally honest, I didn't read the whole book. I skipped from page 165 to 275 to see how the book turned out.

The book is about Argus, a frustrated artist who joins the Canadian army in 1917 to go to France to find his brother in law Ebbin, and the adventures surrounding that escapade. Ms Duffy intersperses that story with chapters about the lives of those Argus and Ebbin left behind in Canada. I found neither of these stories sufficiently compelling to hold my interest.

I am well aware it is important for an author to paint verbal images to pull the reader into the story. Ms Duffy uses mountains of metaphor and avalanches of adjectives in an attempt to do just that. However, for me these efforts got in the way and prompted my ADHD mind to go get a cup of tea, or go for a walk, or google causality figures for WWI and the battle of Vimy ridge, or impact WWI had on global population (almost none in the grand scheme of things).

I must say that I did come across some sentences that painted an image, but then the mood is lost: “Pink and lavender sweet peas fluttered on the vine – their scent, light as air, filling him with temporary amnesia for the war. Beyond the vines, beyond the sheltering branches of an Elm, the women rubbed their hair with thick towels and then sat in a circle in the sun, each one coming the next one's hair with wide toothed combs.”

I was never able to decide what this book was trying to be. I guess it is WWI historical fiction, as there is reference to actual events including actual statistics, but I am not sure. I am actually a fan of historical fiction, but if you are, and are interested in WWI, I suggest you choose Ken Follett's The Fall of Giants. I spent less time reading that 985 pages than I have struggling through this.

The book did offer some redeeming character in the last 50 pages or so. It focuses on the war's impact on the lives of those who return and those loved ones who never left. Investigating these sorts of impacts is typical of book and I think is a very important subject for people to understand, and Ms. Duffy does this well.

Ordinarily I would not have picked up this book, but it arrived as part of Elliott Bay Book's "Maiden Voyage" series (staff picks of first novels). It kept my interest all the way through, which is saying a lot for a genre of fiction that I generally don't go for. It occasionally zigged when I thought it would zag - there was a point where I happily expected it to leap off into the realm of magical realism (alas, it did not). The characters are interesting, although not all as clearly drawn as one might hope. But, hey, it's a first novel and a very accomplished one at that.

Gorgeous writing with well-crafted, evocative sentences that I would often re-read just to savor them. The Nova Scotia & France storylines were equally engaging. The characters were interesting & complex and I loved the often atypical family dynamics. Angus and Simon Peter are sympathetic protagonists and several of the secondary characters (especially Charlotte) either quickly, or eventually, became favorites of mine.

This is a very good book, although difficult to read at times. Set during WW1, the story moves between Nova Scotia and France as it follows Angus MacGrath into the war. The battle scenes seem very true to life and, as I said, quite difficult to read at times, but the ongoing saga of both Angus, and those he left at home, makes this book well worth the read.

An ambitious attempt to recreate what happens when our moral compass falters (and we have to chart our way through No Man's Land -- get it?). The story follows that theme during WWI both at the War Front, and simultaneously in the Nova Scotian Home Front, through two major characters, Angus, who enlists to find his brother-in-law gone missing in battle, and Simon, Angus's 13 y.o. son left to wonder about it all in a small fishing village.

What makes this novel really good is the fact that I find the dual narrative technique almost damned impossible to pull off successfully. Nine times out of ten, I tend to enjoy one of the storylines far more than the other, then it becomes a chore to plough through the "secondary" story. Duffy performed an amazing balancing act in creating intrigue and urgency in the fishing village and Simon's life that matched and sometimes even surpassed my interest in what was going on with Angus and the war. I also give the author kudos for capturing great voice in the varying characters, remaining true to the era and the communities portrayed.

What stopped this book from achieving five-star status and sometimes threatened demotion to three-stars was, first, the implausible premise for Angus's enlistment (sorry, but even if I accept that he is willing to leave his wife and the son he loves very much, there is NO WAY I can buy into the notion he thinks he can find his brother-in-law, Ebbin, while working as a cartographer in London, which for obvious reasons that contradict the premise itself, never happens). In fact, the whole plotline about Ebbin was a bit of a head-shaker for me. And while Duffy is quite adept at her description, she was less sure-footed when it came to action: I found several of the battle scenes very, very hard to visualize. Finally, there were a couple of minor characters who just stayed flat or unrealistic.

In summary, this was a generally enjoyable book that occasionally lurched between lyrical and evocative towards melodrama or muddled action, but it never lacked interest for me, and I admired its scope.

3 1/2 stars

It took me a while to finish this, not because the book is tiresome but due to my own recent troubles. I almost didn't sign up for it through From Left to Write as I intended to participate in NaNoWriMo this month but I'm glad I was persuaded to do so. This is historical fiction at it's finest. The characters may not be real, but it's easy to believe they could have been. It's refreshing to read an account of The Great War from a Canadian perspective, we Americans can tend to be a bit ethnocentric. I loved the parallels between Angus and Paul oversees and Mr. Heist and Simon Peter back home. I'm amazed that even though the premise was Angus going to look for his brother-in-law, in the end it seemed as if the book wasn't about that. His search and what he found seemed almost a side story to the realities of war.

I recieved a copy of this book for review purposes, but all thoughts are my own.

This book is a good story dealing with the impact of WWI on a family, and the characters and setting being Canadian is a nice change of pace.

That said, some of the characters felt a little flat, and if you're looking for a book with good battle scenes, this isn't the one for you. I was expecting something more cohesive when it came to the battle of Vimy Ridge, but the telling of it didn't leave me with any real satisfaction. In fact, it seemed like the Germans just didn't show up, despite the Canadians losing 4,000 people in the battle.

All in all it was worth a read, but it isn't one I'd rush out to buy.