I’ll admit it, I do judge books by their covers sometimes. I flipped through a paperback copy of Foundling because the color scheme appealed to me, and the cover artwork is drawn in a style I really like. I checked for the artist’s name and found out that D. M. Cornish is the author and the artist for the cover and all of the interior illustrations.
The book jacket description of an orphan boy – named Rossamünd, and no he’s not happy about that – leaving his home of Madame Opera’s Estimable Marine Society for Foundling Boys and Girls so he can start his career as a Lamplighter sounded like an entertaining boy’s adventure. Then I found what looked like a sizable glossary in the back, with descriptions of monsters and monster-fighters (some of whom have been…altered to make them into better monster-fighters), and before I knew it I’d read the first twenty pages of the book.
Okay, Mr. Cornish, I’m officially intrigued.
The Colonial-Era (sort of) setting was a welcome change. Most fantasy novels seem to have either a Neo-Victorian theme (steampunk), or they’re set in a kind of proto-Medieval time period. Don’t get me wrong, I love both of those, but having a story set in a world of tri-corner hats and Dickensian orphanages and towns with names like Brandenbrass, High Vesting, and Proud Sulking made for a nice bit of variety.
It’s hard to avoid the inevitable Harry Potter comparison when your main character is a picked-on orphan. But Rossamünd (the name pinned to his blanket when he was abandoned as a baby, and he’s pretty much stuck with it now) stands out in that he isn’t so much actively miserable as he is matter-of-factly resigned to his situation. He’s looking forward to the day when he’ll leave the foundlingery (and a little worried that he’s been old enough to work for almost a year now with no job offers yet), and he spends his time reading anything he can and dodging bullies. He’s even developed a system to figure out how much he can trust someone based on how they react when learning that he has a girl’s name .
It helps that Rossamünd gets along well with grown-ups, especially Verline the parlor maid and Masters Fransitart and Craumpalin, two old vinegaroons who work as caretakers of the foundlingery. Vinegaroons would be the common term for sailors who work the Vinegar Seas. That’s not just a nickname; the seas on the world of Half-Continent are pungent and multi-colored from the exotic salts that dissolve up from the ocean floor. The skin of a vinegaroon is pitted and blotched from caustic chemicals in the sea-spray, they typically don’t live long unless they’re very tough, and Rossamünd has been dreaming of growing up to be one his entire life.
Those dreams are dashed when Rossamünd is instead hired to be a Lamplighter. It’s not the life of adventure he was hoping for, but it gets him away from the foundlingery and his nemesis Gosling, so he can’t really complain. Kitted out with the best supplies (exhaustively described) that the kindly Fransitart and Craumpalin can muscle up for him, our boy-hero sets off to his new job miles away in High Vesting.
…and promptly gets kidnapped, shipwrecked, and completely lost, and has to find his way through miles of wilderness without getting eaten.
Along the way he meets the beautiful and deadly Europe, her faceless manservant Licurius, and a host of quirky characters and monsters. Cornish has a flair for description, painting beautiful scenes of Rossamünd’s travels: a lonely forest at sunset, cobblestone-paved towns, and imposing fortresses that are built to span an entire river. There are also some very cool-sounding action scenes, like a longcoat-wearing woman flinging lightning from her hands into a hoard of goblins in the middle of the night.
But it’s the amazing depth of the complex world that Cornish has created that really stunned me. Remember the glossary I mentioned? It’s one hundred and twenty pages long, a third of the size of the rest of the book! Cornish apparently started compiling notebooks about his Half-Continent world when he was studying illustration at at the University of South Australia. He ended up filling twenty-three journals with illustrations and history and definitions, and it shows. It’s an overwhelming amount of detail (“Tolkienesque” as my husband described it), and every chapter has more unique elements, like ships that are powered with huge specially-grown muscles in boxes, surgeons who implant “alien” organs to give people strange powers, or warrior alchemists who brew special chemicals for use in battle.
At this point I absolutely have to read the next two books in this trilogy (plus the short-story collection released in 2014), because by the time the book ends we’ve been loaded down with so many fascinating details and conflicting characters, while at the same time Rossamünd’s story has only just started. Everything that happens in this book is a prequel to Rossamünd’s career as a lamplighter, a career that he’s quickly learning will be much more dangerous than anything he could have experienced as a sailor. Especially since he’s also finding out that he has an unhealthy amount of sympathy for the “dangerous” monsters he’s been taught to fear, and he’s been given a tantalizing hint about who he was before being left on the foundlinery’s doorstep.