SOURCE: Korelitz, Jean Hanff. “Slouching to Suburbia.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4790 (20 January 1995): 20.

In the following review, Korelitz praises A Map of the World for its skillful evocation of rural Midwestern life.

Jane Hamilton's tense novel [A Map of the World] opens with the accidental drowning of a two-year-old girl. While her two daughters and her best friend's two daughters, whom she is minding, are all playing downstairs, the narrator, Alice Goodwin, dashes upstairs to look for a bathing-suit, happens on the long-forgotten map of the world she had drawn the summer of her mother's early death, and pauses over it for one breathless, elastic moment. Long enough. In just that blink of time, Lizzie Collins disappears, finds the glorious, bucolic pond on the Goodwin farm, and is lost.

You would think that would be agony enough, but the accident merely marks the onset of troubles for the Goodwin...