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Perhaps it’s a result of conditioning by reading Tolkien at an early age, but it bugs me when I encounter an imaginary-world epic fantasy with no map of its world. Such was the case with Sean Russell’s The One Kingdom, a book which I set aside the other day after it failed to really grab my attention after 90 pages or so. I’ll try it again another time; I’ve had the experience many times of bouncing off a novel only to return to it some time later — years later, even — and come to love it immensely. But the lack of a map seriously rankles, especially in a book where geographical features play an apparently important role (in this case, a river).