Description

Seventeen-year-old Zibby is admitted to a small-city adolescent psych unit for an eating disorder; Nico, the boy who notices her first, is there for depression and anxiety. Neither expects to find love within therapy rooms, greenhouses, and whispered library exchanges, but their six weeks together form a fragile map of first love marked in letters, sketches, and unspoken promises. Ten years later, Zibby and Nico cross paths by chance at the Las Vegas airport — older, widowed, and carrying scars the other never saw coming. What unfolds is not a rekindling of teenage intensity but a quiet reckoning with the truth: first love doesn't fade. It carves coordinates we carry forever. The Cartography of First Love is a tender YA romance about the maps we make in youth, the echoes they leave in adulthood, and how love and loss shape the journeys we choose.