Foundling

Starred review from June 19, 2006
Highly ambitious, Cornish's fantasy debut boasts a glossary/appendix alone that is more than 100 pages long—and it makes for nearly as fascinating reading as the story itself. Rossamünd Bookchild ("a boy with a girl's name"), is an orphan living at Madam Opera's Estimable Marine Society for Foundling Boys and Girls, where instructors groom the orphans to serve in the Boschenberg Navy and other agencies. One day a stranger with odd eyes arrives ("What should have been white was blood red, and his irises were the palest, most piercing blue.... a leer!") and hires Rossamünd as a "lamplighter" for the Emperor. (The boy identifies a leer
as a tracker of men and monsters; the glossary offers further chilling details.) En route to his new job, he is misled into boarding a doomed boat, and winds up alone in a world where humans and monsters wage constant war. When a human kills a monster, he gets a "monster-blood tattoo," made from the beast's blood and bearing its likeness. Rossamünd's action-packed road story serves chiefly to build and populate Cornish's remarkable new world, the Half-Continent. Its roots were planted in a series of illustrated notebooks the author began while attending art school. His drawings endow both humans and monsters with personality, and detailed maps plus a 16-month calendar year add to readers' sense that this milieu has existed for centuries. From the pre-industrial English feel to the sprawling setting and backstory, this book feels every bit as substantial as its heft implies. Ages 10-up.