From the pre-industrial English feel to the sprawling setting and backstory, this book feels every bit as substantial as its heft implies. 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. Its roots were planted in a series of illustrated notebooks the author began while attending art school.
Rossamünd's action-packed road story serves chiefly to build and populate Cornish's remarkable new world, the Half-Continent. When a human kills a monster, he gets a "monster-blood tattoo," made from the beast's blood and bearing its likeness. (The boy identifies a leerĪs 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. a leer!") and hires Rossamünd as a "lamplighter" for the Emperor. 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. 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. Cornish’s tale of scolds, scourges, smugglers and shrewds will thrill and captivate, and leave the reader desperate for more.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. Stunning in scope and rich in detail, alive with memorable heroes and villains and brimming with new and original science and magics, D.M. And all Rossamund carries with him is a battered almanac and a pocketful of cheap potions. Only monster-hunters, leers and the most desperate of brigands dare travel the inland ways unguarded.
Such a road is not for the faint of heart. But for Rossamund to begin his education, he must first undertake a journey of his own: to the great city of High Vesting. He is being sent to train as a Lamplighter – to bring light to the inland roads of the Half-Continent, to shine the way for travellers through lands peopled by outcasts, monsters and worse. But fate has chosen him for a different path.
Rossamund has always dreamed of a career in the Navy, fighting tentacled monsters and rescuing damsels from hook-handed pirates. Monsters, rogues and wonder abound in this utterly original, fearsomely exciting and beautifully detailed fantasy tale of an orphaned boys.
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