Thereafter, things get better as characters bed in and the action picks up pace. The story is littered with dialogue of the 'it'll be trouble to 'im all 'is life if 'e don't get shrewder and tougher, just mark me' variety, and the first 40 pages are extremely heavy going. What slowed this reader down most of all, though, was Cornish's habit of quoting speech in the vernacular. With The Lord of the Rings regularly topping polls as Britain's favourite read, we know there's a market for fantasy that comes with built-in pseudo-historical scholarship, but, with a book of such length, one wonders whether Foundling can carry such in-depth treatment. In Foundling, Cornish's own invention and reinvention of words are a similar barrier at times ('he tried to imagine a lahzar battling with some giant nicker'). It's more of an old-fashioned adventure yarn set in a world slightly off- kilter from our own, with its own peculiar laws of nature.Ī few years back, we had Bowering Sivers's Jammy Dodgers On the Run, a story so jam-packed with Victorian slang that Dickens would have had a problem understanding what was going on. This is neither magical fantasy nor a sweeping battle-strewn epic. Long before Beauty and the Beast, we've known that it's what's on the inside that counts, something that Cornish's (male) hero Rossamünd has to find out for himself on his very personal journey. There are also a number of Cornish's full-page character portraits dotted throughout the book, reminiscent of the pencil sketches in Joshua Mowll's Guild trilogy.Ĭornish's Half-Continent is a world of 'tricorner hats and flintlock pistols', inhabited by humans, monsters and the surgically altered people who lie somewhere in between. This includes a calendar, cross-sections, diagrams and maps of such detail I wish they'd come with a magnifying glass supplied.

I'm paraphrasing from an entry in the glossary, part of a 100-plus page 'Explicarium', which takes up over a quarter of the book. A monster-blood tattoo (with a hyphen in the text) is a tattoo given to someone who has just slain a monster, made with some of the blood siphoned off that same monster.

Monster blood tattoo foundling