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Cornish, who drew the wonderfully detailed and evocative sketches that illustrate the text, proves himself a world-builder of the first order, one with the writing chops to keep up with and artfully present the place he's so richly created, including maps and an astonishing explicarium. In fact, his one weak spot is that he's overly fond of dialect spelling, but even this cannot distract from his remarkable cast of characters, foremost among them the protagonist of this bildungsroman, the foundling of this first volume, Rossamund Bookchild. I can't overstate how quickly he makes the reader feel the grittiness and danger of this place, the Half-Continent; it simply has to be experienced first-hand.