‘World’ has many meanings. It can describe a planet with its land, geology, possibly water, atmosphere, stratosphere, and associated astrological bodies such as moons or asteroid belts. A world can also relate to social environments such as the ‘world of the internet’ or describe any person, place, thing or time with which something or someone interacts. The World of Wellington’s Map is boundless because it takes the owner to people and places where time has a special meaning. So this world continues to grow and each book further relates the journeys of Jaime Lockhart and Nicole Steward. But before we go down any road, we must meet our travelers.

If you were looking at an identification card for Jaime, you would see that she is five feet nine, has auburn hair and is about to celebrate her fourteenth birthday. She has parents and a set of grandparents living with her in Pauls Valley, is considered a ‘brain’ at school and has a best friend Nicole. Jaime also has a friend who owns an antique store in town who acts as a history and map mentor to her. Charlie Linder keeps his eye out for anything that might interest his young student such as old books or maps.

Maps fascinate Jaime Lockhart. She feels they hold great secrets and are much more than a travel guide to a physical location. The journey to a site on a map takes one through a unique terrain to a place filled with its own history and hidden stories. Each town develops its individual culture, society and belief systems. Every city evolves from a distinctive series of events, personal interactions and unexpected experiences. This is the reason she is amused when she hears people planning trips to a far off place yet never bothering to search out what is in their own back yard. Jaime sees a map as a guide to a network of points of collective experiences.

Despite her hometown of Pauls Valley, Oklahoma being small, she enjoys its simplicity and past. It is a quiet little town with its own festivals and community gatherings and she relishes it while she can. Something inside her draws her to look at maps differently than anyone else. She doesn’t understand why, but Jaime intuitively knows that the quiet she experiences now will not last and the day may come all too quickly when she wishes she could get it back.

Nicole Steward on the other hand is shorter with the darker features of her partial Indian ancestry. Jaime seems both grounded but a little odd to her. That is why she’s drawn to her friend who on the one hand also thinks Matt Evans is very cute while having this ridiculous hobby of collecting and studying maps. Not to worry, Nicole accepted the challenge of keeping Jaime in the normal world by dragging her shopping and demonstrating the fine art of pre-teen cosmetics and fashion.

Okay well you have a sense of who the two main characters are. Now I’ll provide a few little links to some of the places visited by some of the characters in the book. I hope you check back as I will continue to add more information about the world of Wellington’s Map. I can’t give away too much information right now.

• King Midas – according to Wikipedia
• What have PENN Museum excavations reveal about Gordion, the ancient Phrygian capital in central Turkey?
• What did King Midas eat? - from the web site of the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology
• Sacred Heart Mission - from http://www.konawa.k12.ok.us/community/
• Violet Springs - from http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com 

Coming soon – information about Fauxleigh and the Gares who live there; a space station and the planet Operon.