Shady Oak Press (2025) ISBN: 978-1961841468 Reviewed by Stephanie Elizabeth Long for Reader Views (09/2025)
Abigail Whimsy and Lainey Bliss have been best friends since the second grade. Like yin and yang, their opposites somehow fit together like errant puzzle pieces. Whimsy exists in a world of vibrant dreams and imagination, while Lainey is pragmatic and even-keeled, which anchors Abigail. Because nothing good can last forever, the girls have one final summer together before Lainey goes off to a fancy college, leaving Abigail behind.
Before Lainey leaves, Abigail has devised a plan. They will create a map (complete with a detailed legend) and explore all the mysteries of their town—dismantle the “thin” places, using her late grandmother’s journal (chaotic musings) as a guide.
As they delve deeper into the journey, Abigail’s reality becomes skewed, and Lainey’s attempts to keep her friend’s sanity in check become more difficult. The places they visit awaken a humming within Abigail, and the more they add to the map, the louder the hum becomes.
Whimsy and Bliss is a coming-of-age literary masterpiece. Angela Gray’s writing is known for its vivid imagery and deep metaphors, and this novel is no exception. Readers will quickly be immersed in Abigail’s world of wanderlust, where magic and realism become blurred. Beyond that, the character-driven story explores themes of friendship, self-discovery, and bridging the transition from childhood to young adulthood.
Sometimes it can be hard to decipher the difference between imagination and illness. The author has done an excellent job of illustrating Abigail’s unraveling—the whispering of nature, the ebb and flow of the hum, and the excitement turned obsession. With every place Abigail and Lainey traversed, I fell more in tune with Abigail’s frequency, at times questioning what was real and what was fictitious—this is the type of story that makes you see the world differently.
Whimsy and Bliss certainly highlights the plight of mental illness, particularly hypomania. Still, at its core, the novel’s overarching message is one of connection and trust—it’s the impenetrable sisterhood between two young women on the cusp of adulthood. In a world that is often stuck in the me-versus-you mentality, the solidarity between friends is refreshing, teaching us that we don’t have to suffer alone; we can lean on others for support.
For readers who love young adult books about friendship and adventure with a focus on mental health, this literary gem will appeal to you. Angela Gray’s exquisite prose is unmatched, and the multilayered characters are memorable. Abigail and Lainey’s map of thin places will forever hold a special place in my heart.
This is the summer of locked doors, fragile rituals, and the ghosts that keep count.
I’m Stevie Matthews—almost sixteen, the kind of girl people whisper about. “Bat-shit crazy,” they say. Maybe they’re right. This summer, the order cracks. Obsessive thoughts tighten like barbed wire, rituals multiply, and the only way forward is a hospital stay I never asked for.
Behind those doors, I meet strangers who feel both broken and familiar, each carrying their own secret galaxies of fear and hope. Together, we make a kind of map—messy, jagged, stitched with laughter, unraveling with heartbreak.
This is the story of how I learn that friendship can be born from accident, that healing isn’t neat or pretty, and that sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.
This book is a tender, unflinching portrait of adolescence, OCD, and the fragile alchemy of survival—equal parts bruised and luminous, like a diary written in ink and ghost light.
Read our review of “The Cartography of First Love.”
The Cartography of First Love
Angela Grey Shady Oak Press (2025) ISBN: 978-1961841444
Angela Grey is an Indigenous novelist, poet, and painter whose work explores the intersections of memory, identity, and healing. She studied creative writing as well as spirituality and healing at the University of Minnesota, where she deepened her commitment to storytelling as both art and medicine. Alongside her writing, Angela finds balance in yoga and mindfulness practices, particularly Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which shape the reflective quality of her work. She lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, with her husband, one spirited pup, and four cats. When she’s not writing, she enjoys camping, budget travel to places like Maine, Oregon, and the coastal Carolinas, and gathering with family around a BBQ grill.
Welcome to Reader Views, Angela. What is The Cartography of First Love about, and what was your inspiration behind the story?
Angela Grey
The Cartography of First Love is about two teens who fall for each other in a psych ward and, years later, collide again by chance, discovering that first love leaves the deepest coordinates on the heart. I drew inspiration from my own first love, Timothy, and the way certain people map us forever, no matter how much time or distance passes.
The book uses the language of geography, such as maps, coordinates, fault lines, and grids as a recurring motif. What drew you to this metaphor, and how did it shape Zibby and Nico’s story?
I’ve always believed that first love is like a map that’s messy, unfinished, and yet it guides you long after you’ve left that place. With Zibby and Nico, the metaphor became their heartbeat: every moment they shared, every scar and smile, became a kind of coordinate. Even when life pulls them apart, the map they drew together continues to shape the routes they take back to themselves and, ultimately, to each other.
What did telling the story from both Zibby and Nico’s perspectives allow you to show that might have been missed if it came from only one of them?
Telling the story from both Zibby and Nico’s perspectives allowed me to show how first love is never just one-sided; instead, it’s a dialogue of hearts, where each carries their own fears, hopes, and unspoken longings. Their alternating voices reminded me of my own first love with Timothy, how two people can remember the same moment differently, yet together those memories form a map that’s more complete, more tender, and more true.
Zibby’s eating disorder and Nico’s depression are handled with both honesty and sensitivity. What guided you in portraying these struggles in a way that felt true to teen readers?
What guided me most was the memory of my own teen years living with an eating disorder, anxiety, and depression. I remember how isolating it felt, how every day was a negotiation between silence and survival, and how desperately I wished to see characters who mirrored that reality without judgment or cliché. Writing about Zibby and Nico, I drew from those struggles, but also from the fragile beauty I found in connection during that time, such as the way even small moments of kindness could feel like lifelines. I wanted teen readers to feel seen, to recognize themselves in the honesty of the pain, but also to believe in the possibility of love and healing that can grow even in the hardest places.
The ward setting with its sterile walls, tiled floors, and glass windows defines Zibby and Nico’s daily life. What guided your choices in bringing that environment to life on the page?
The ward setting came from a very personal place, my own hospitalization as a teen for an eating disorder. I remember the way the sterile walls and glass windows could feel both suffocating and strangely safe, how the rhythm of medication rounds and group sessions became a backdrop against which fragile connections bloomed. I wanted Zibby and Nico’s world to carry that same duality: a place of restriction and routine, but also one where small rebellions such as passing a note, planting something green, laughing at the wrong moment, could feel like acts of freedom. Writing those details was my way of honoring how, even in the most controlled environments, first love and hope find a way through the cracks.
Zibby and Nico’s bond is often expressed without words—through touch, puzzles, and greenhouse afternoons. Ordinary activities also take on extraordinary meaning in the ward. Why did you want their connection and healing to grow out of these quiet, everyday moments?
Because in a place where everything is monitored and spoken words can feel heavy, it’s the quiet, ordinary moments that become extraordinary. For Zibby and Nico, healing wasn’t about grand declarations; it was about finding love in the small spaces where hope could breathe.
The plant named Atlas is one of the most powerful recurring images. What does Atlas symbolize for you within the story? For me, Atlas is both a burden and a prayer in that he carries the gravity of pain, yet in his fragile leaves and quiet growth, he shows how love can turn even the heaviest weight into a living map toward hope.
“Absence” becomes a theme Zibby confronts throughout the story. How did you want readers to think about absence, loss, and the presence that lingers behind?
I wanted readers to feel that absence is never truly empty because it leaves a shape, a breath, a lingering presence that continues to guide us, like a map traced in negative space. In Zibby’s world, loss becomes its own kind of presence, reminding her, and us, that love endures even in what’s missing.
Many young adult romances end when the couple parts ways, but you carried the story through separation, silence, and even a ten-year reunion. What compelled you to extend their map beyond the hospital walls?
Because first love doesn’t end at goodbye; instead, it lingers, shaping every road we take afterward. I wanted to show that Zibby and Nico’s map wasn’t just drawn inside the hospital walls, but continued through distance, silence, and time, proving that some coordinates remain etched in the heart until fate brings you back to them.
The epilogue introduces a “map legend” with entries like “Tiles,” “Cracks,” and “Coordinates.” How did you envision this legend as a closing note to the novel?
The legend is a map of absences as much as presences, where even cracks and silences become markers or proof that love leaves traces long after the moment has passed.
Readers might see Zibby and Nico as ‘two broken kids,’ yet your story shows another side of what it means to endure. How do you define strength in the context of their relationship?
For me, the strength in Zibby and Nico’s relationship isn’t about being unbreakable; instead, it’s about choosing to reach for each other even in their most fragile moments. They teach us that endurance isn’t the absence of pain, but the courage to let love in, to share the weight of what feels unbearable, and to believe that two so-called “broken” hearts can still map out something whole together.
Family, whether present or absent or in the background, shapes both characters deeply. How did you decide how much of their family lives to bring into the novel?
I wanted family to be like a shadow in the story that’s sometimes heavy, sometimes faint, but always shaping how Zibby and Nico move through the world. By showing just enough of their families, I could reveal the fractures and absences that made them vulnerable, while leaving space for the found family they create in each other. In that way, family becomes both the wound and the soil from which their love takes root.
The Cartography of First Love is lyrical, often more like poetry than straightforward prose. What role does style play in how you tell such a tender but heavy story?
The lyrical style lets the story breathe by turning silence, touch, and small moments into poetry, so Zibby and Nico’s love feels as tender as it is heavy.
You dedicate the novel both to your husband and to your first love. How did your own experiences of love influence the emotional landscape of this book?
My own experiences of love gave the book its emotional compass. My first love taught me the intensity and fragility of being truly seen for the first time and the way those early feelings etch themselves into you forever. My husband has shown me what it means for love to endure, to grow deeper with time, and to hold both joy and struggle. Together, those experiences shaped the novel’s landscape: the passion of first love, the ache of loss, and the hope of finding a love that lasts.
Art in the form of sketches, puzzles, and drawings, along with movement such as counting tiles, tracing cracks, or standing in an airport, gives the story texture. How do creative expression and place tie into your idea of recovery and love?
Art and place are the coordinates of healing, like each sketch, crack, and step is a reminder that love maps itself onto the world as we learn to recover.
Young adult readers often look for themselves in fiction. What do you hope a teen facing struggles with mental health or belonging might take away from Zibby and Nico’s journey?
I hope a teen reading this story feels less alone. Zibby and Nico are proof that you don’t have to be “fixed” to be worthy of love or belonging and that even in the middle of struggle, you can still laugh, create, connect, and dream. My wish is that readers carry away the sense that their story isn’t over, that healing isn’t linear, and that the coordinates of first love, friendship, and hope can guide them forward no matter how heavy things feel.
There’s something unforgettable about the emotions of first love. How did you work to capture that fleeting intensity on the page?
To me, first love feels like a spark that lights up everything around it, even if only for a moment, and I wanted the language to carry that same glow. I leaned into the fleeting intensity: the way a brush of a hand can feel seismic, or how a single glance can echo louder than a thousand words. By writing with that kind of urgency and tenderness, I tried to bottle the impossibility of first love like the way it vanishes and yet marks you forever.
The book closes with a kind of map legend, almost like a guide to memory. What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing the story?
I hope readers carry away the truth that first love is never lost because it simply becomes a compass, guiding the heart forward.
Do you have another piece of work in mind after you finish promoting The Cartography of First Love?
Yes, while I was writing The Cartography of First Love, I was also working on another novel, Whimsy and Bliss, over the span of ten years. In some ways, the two books grew up alongside each other: Cartography carries the raw intensity of first love, while Whimsy and Bliss leans into memory, family, and the thin places where the ordinary brushes against the extraordinary. Now that Cartography is stepping into the world, I’m excited to give Whimsy and Bliss the attention it deserves and to share how the two stories, though different, echo each other in the ways they explore love, loss, and belonging.
Is there anything else you’d like to add for our readers today?
Only that I’m deeply grateful to every reader who picks up The Cartography of First Love. This story was born out of my own struggles and first love, but it belongs just as much to anyone who’s ever felt fragile, out of place, or overwhelmed by the intensity of their heart. If readers walk away feeling seen, less alone, and reminded that love, whether first love, lasting love, or the love we’re still searching for, can guide us forward, then I’ve given the book all I hoped it could be.
Hello, I’m Angela Grey: a writer, painter w/4 grown kids, nana w/2 bobtails 2 Manx, Cocker Spaniel/Cavalier King Charles pup, that enjoys both spirituality and yoga classes and is a staunch mental health advocate. I read and write YA, mystery, memoir, and romance, and I am currently working on a YA fantasy series.
This is another book in that same first class in Spirituality & Resilience about which I had to lead a discussion. The book was rather intimidating at first because I questioned the existence of a God. Despite growing up catholic, I strayed from religion and sought something more intellectual. So, this book challenged me.
The author begins by going into telling us that our search to find God is narrowed down to a response of the brain which Chopra calls the “God response.” It falls into seven definite events taking place inside the brain and are much more basic than your beliefs, but they give rise to beliefs that bridge from our world to an invisible domain where matter dissolves and spirit emerges:
Fight-or-flight response: we turn to God when we need to survive. You fulfill your life through family, a sense of belonging like to a community, and material comforts.
Reactive response (this is the brain’s creation of a personal identity): we turn to God because we need to achieve, accomplish, and compete. You fulfill your life through success, status, and other ego satisfactions.
Restfulness awareness response: we turn to God because we need to feel that the outer world isn’t going to swallow us up in its endless turmoil. You fulfill your response through peace, centeredness, self-acceptance, and inner silence.
Intuitive response (the brain looks for information both inside and out): we turn to God for him to validate that our inner world is good. Outer knowledge is objective; but inner knowledge is intuitive. The God that matches this response is understanding and forgiving. You full your life though insight, empathy, tolerance, and forgiveness.
Creative response (the human brain can invent new things and discover new facts): we turn to him out of our wonder at the beauty and formal complexity of nature. We call this inspiration, and its mirror is a Creator who made the whole world from nothing. You fulfill your life through inspiration, expanded creativity in art or science, and unlimited discovery.
Visionary response (a form of pure awareness that feels joyful and blessed): we need such a God to explain why magic an exist side by side with ordinary mundane reality. This contact can be bewildering because it has no roots in the material world. You fulfill your life through reverence, compassion, devoted service, and universal love.
Sacred response: we need him because without a source, our existence has no foundation at all. You fulfill your life through wholeness and unity with the divine.
These seven responses form the basis of religion whether the God is absent or non-existent or one of pure love and light. Each religion projects a different view of reality with a matching God. Only the brain can deliver the vast range of deities that exist in human experience. We select a deity based on interpretation of reality, and that interpretation is rooted in biology.
I enjoyed how the book went into the power of intention and what makes life spiritual. Also diverting was how the author explored the mysteries and complexities and wove them together to open new doors for us to ruminate. If you want to read it in its entirety, get it here.
This book encourages you to detach from the causes of suffering, embrace your psychological pain, identify your values, and take action towards those values. It is all based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) which focuses on mindfulness techniques, acceptance, and value-centric living. The author pretty much outlines the path out of suffering and towards full engagement of life.
When people believe their negative thoughts and incorporate them into their personal identity, their perspective becomes severely limited, and suffering becomes twofold. There is pain of the presence like anxiety and depression. When focusing on such negative states, a secondary type of agitation emerges: the pain of absence, which refers to the inability to move forward in life and the opportunities missed as a result.
Mindfulness techniques are very effective in catching negative thoughts before they become an ingrained part of one’s identity or self-concept. A daily practice of meditation and other contemplative practices can create a healthy distance between negative thoughts and one’s sense of self as external to those thoughts. Practicing acceptance, or the willingness to experience the situation and self exactly as they are in the present moment is the next step. The third step is to identify values, which are not life goals or specific outcomes but rather directions in life that people make the conscious decision to move toward. Once values are identified, incorporating practices of mindfulness and acceptance paves the way to values-driven living.
Key insights of this book are:
There are two faces of human suffering: present pain, which refers to an undesirable condition, and the pain of absence which results from not living a full life.
Human beings think relationally, creating temporal, causal, and comparative links between various subjects.
Running away from pain only makes it more palpable.
Avoidance can be counteracted by the belief that it’s possible to respond in a new way to old problems.
Acceptance means letting go of trying to control thoughts and feelings.
Creating distance between the self and negative thoughts is the first step in reducing emotional pain.
Identifying with the consciousness that holds pain is preferable to identifying with the pain itself.
Mindfulness practices heighten the ability to be flexible and access a wide range of reactions.
Pain offers meaningful guidance to identify values.
I really enjoyed this methodically and thoughtfully written book which made the philosophical underpinnings of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) accessible. I strongly suggest reading it in its entirety. Get it here.
I first read this book ten years ago for a Spirituality & Resilience class. It’s pretty straightforward in that whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. Now how are you going to handle it? Don’t lose touch with yourself and fall into a robot-like way of seeing and thinking and doing where you break contact with your deepest self because if not careful, those moments can stretch out and last a lifetime. Don’t be preoccupied with the past, with what has already happened, or with a future that hasn’t arrived yet because you may fall quite unawares into assuming is the truth about what is out there in the world and in here in our minds because much of the time, it just isn’t so.
The author goes on to say that we may pay a high price for this mistaken and unexamined assumption by willfully ignoring the richness of our present moments. The fallout accumulates silently, coloring our lives without our knowing it or being able to do something about it. Instead, we lock ourselves into a personal fiction that is enshrouded in thoughts, fantasies, and impulses mostly about the past and the future that veil our direction and the very ground we stand on. This book tells you how to wake up from such dreams and the nightmares they turn into. Go from ignorance—our mindlessness, to being in touch with the not knowing which is mindfulness, by using meditation, and wakefulness which is present moment awareness.
It is important to note that meditation is not some cryptic activity, and does not involve becoming a zombie, cultist, devotee, or mystic. It is simply about being yourself, coming to realize that you are on a path that is your life, see that this path has direction that is always unfolding moment by moment and that what happens in this moment influences what happens next.
Reading this book in its entirety helps get out of the fog-enshrouded, slippery slope that we get into and that we may follow right into our grave or that fog-dispelling clarity at the moment before death where we realize that all the thought we placed on past and future was based on ignorance and fear. Instead shed those life-limiting ideas that aren’t the truth or the way our life has to be at all. When I first read this book, it seemed too straightforward in saying that “it is what it is.” But considering I had to lead a discussion on it the following day, I reread it and really got into it and got the message. It was one of the books that started me on this journey of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, as well as spirituality and resilience seeking. Get it here.
Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking Over your Life
This book is similar to the last book on Zen philosophy that I reviewed which was The Art of Simple Living. It consists of 100 suggestions to simplify your life and starts by noting things about our volatile world such as entertainment is more attractive than education, personal gain rates higher than personal growth, and being selfless is less attractive than taking selfies. We’re in an age where we are immobilized by little things that get in the way of what we want. So, when it seems to many of us that society has lost its way, this book is here to bring you back to your simplified higher self and core values of kindness.
Some of the 100 points touched on in this brief, honest, pure and simple little self-help book are:
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff—instead of focusing on little problems and concerns and blow them out of proportion, focus on the magic and beauty of life.
Make Peace with Imperfection—in the absence of judgment and seeking perfection, you’ll then discover the perfection in life itself.
Beware of the Snowball Effect of Your Thinking—notice how negative and insecure thinking spirals out of control and becomes a thought tornado.
Develop Your Compassion—nothing helps us build our perspective more than empathy of what others experience. It develops our sense of gratitude for the miracle of life.
Learn to Live in the Present Moment—don’t allow past problems and future concerns to make us anxious or depressed. Now is the only time we have and the only time that we have any control over.
Ask Yourself the Question, “Will This Matter a Year from Now?”—play time warp and ask if this “will be one more irrelevant detail in your life?” Don’t allow a mental fork in the road let you get uptight about mini crisis in life.
Practice Humility—humility and inner peace go hand-in-hand. The less compelled you are to prove yourself to others, the more peace inside yourself.
Practice Being in the Eye of the Storm—stay in the specific spot of the center of life’s metaphorical tornadoes or hurricanes that is calm and isolated from the frenzy of stressed or dramatized activity. Be serene in the midst of chaos.
Live This Day as if it Were Your Last. It Might Be—Spend time doing things that you can’t bear to let go unfinished should this moment be your last.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.
William James
This book definitely does give the reader the tools to choose not to sweat the small stuff and to live the big stuff with greater happiness, peace, and big joy. To read this wonderful book, get it here.
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