Alice is a nurse and a mother: she has a double role as caregiver. In the double catastrophe that she has to cope with, Hamilton shows us how vulnerable order and normality can be, especially to those, like mothers and health care professionals, who are expected to provide safety and healing. Despite their beneficence, school nurses are called "the shot ladies" and, Alice says, "we inspired fear wherever we went" (13).

Much of her work, though, involves caring for children neglected by their parents. Being a mother is difficult, too: Alice's older daughter, Emma, is willful and violent toward her mother, and for Alice, maternal care means not defending herself against Emma's anger. Lizzy's drowning, though largely accidental, leaves Alice devastated by her own failure to protect the child.

In Theresa's ability to forgive her friend, we are reminded of how much harder it can be to forgive ourselves when we cause harm without meaning to (and although it does not happen as part of Alice's professional life, this part of the story offers insights readily applicable to discussion of medical mistakes). So when Alice is accused of deliberately abusing her charges, she is incapable of defending herself.

The novel's title comes from the object that distracts Alice early on in the book, while she is meant to be watching Lizzy: a detailed map she had drawn, as a child, of an imaginary world. All that follows reminds us how fragile our attempts are to circumscribe safe, manageable, predictable worlds, like the family, and the farm, where we can feel secure. Reality, even the reality where we are supposedly the caregivers, source of benevolent power, resists our mapping and can undermine our best efforts.

As a solution, Hamilton offers "the web of forgiveness," connections with others that are based not on power or even trust, but on the acceptance of fallibility and fragility. The ideas in this novel are revealing if applied to a health care system where infallibility is assumed to be the norm.