b(ook)log: Foundling

Cornish, D.M. Foundling. New York: Speak, 2007. Print.

Annotation
Book One of the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy follows a young man with no parents, on his way to start an apprenticeship in the wilderness of the Highroads. Lost in a forest full of menacing creatures, he takes up with an even more menacing monster-hunter in D.M. Cornish's striking, gruesome, endlessly inventive world.

(The book includes over 100 pages of maps, appendices, and a glossary detailing the many monsters, oddities, and baroque cultural details of the Half-Continent.)

Booktalk
"Foundling" - it's the term for a child abandoned by his parents. They're raised in institutions, housed and trained until they're old enough to be conscripted into the Imperial Navy, Army, or some other dangerous job unfit for the aristocracy.

Rossamund is a foundling. He's a boy stuck with a girl's name. He's picked to be a highway lamplighter - not the glorious job he always dreamed of. Fate, however, has other plans.

The foundling enters the monstrous world outside the city walls for the first time. It is a world of pirates and smugglers sailing organic, muscular boats; a world of leers, men with chemically altered eyes and living masks; a world of lazhars, hunters with inhuman organs implanted in their bodies to give them inhuman powers. It is a world of monsters.

When Rossamund is thrust into this big and perilous world, he must make a choice about his future. He must be brave, face his destiny, and never again be just a foundling.