This book is the first in The Twig Trilogy, which itself is part of The Edge Chronicles, an ongoing series by the Brighton, England-based team of author Stewart and illustrator Riddell. It's interesting to see more than one current series of kids' books giving equal credit to a writer and an artist for creating a fantasy world together; the hottest American example is the Spiderwick series. Impossible as it may seem, The Edge is even more creatively far-out.

The Edge, as the identical introduction to all three books of this trilogy points out, is the type of place where one really could fall off the end of the world. Descending from the dense, dark highlands of the Deepwoods to the hypnotic Twilight Woods, the bleak Mire, the squalid bustle of Undertown, and the floating city of Sanctaphrax (secured to terra firma by a heavy chain), the known world finally comes to a point at the end of the Stone Gardens, where lighter-than-air rocks slowly grow out of the ground. The Edgwater River runs through it all, and finally plunges off the very tip of this bizarre country into the unknown mists, where anyone who falls off the edge might fall forever. It is a land of many mysteries and dangers, populated by a variety of trolls, elves, goblins, gnomes, and other creatures so strange that I haven't room to describe them. It is a fantasy world exploding with curiosities, whimsies, and horrors, many of them with names that suggest that its creators' favorite author might be Lewis Carroll.

Twig is a slim youngster with matted hair who looks and thinks quite differently from the woodtrolls who raised him. The day finally comes when his "mother-mine" admits that he isn't a woodtroll at all, but a foundling that she raised as one of her own children. When Twig set out to visit some woodtroll relatives, he inadvertently wanders from the path (a very un-woodtroll thing to do), and so strikes out to make his own fortune. Along the way he meets all kinds of creatures, some of them friendly, some deadly - from huge, shaggy, fanged banderbears that howl to each other across lonely distances, to the man-eating blood oak and the cult of "termagant trogs" that worship it; from the dangerously stupid gyle goblins to the diabolically clever gloamglozer. Eventually Twig finds out where he came from and gets the first whiff of his destiny as a great sky pirate captain . . . but not before he must face great fears, griefs, shame, and despair.

This is a hugely promising beginning to an original fantasy series. Though it has enough strange and wonderful flights of imagination to make your head swim, it is firmly anchored in a story we can all recognize, a journey we are willing to join and follow. Though Twig has his not-so-sympathetic moments, he is basically a hero to cheer for - and, in the narrower spots, to wring one's hands over. Save yourself some hand-wringing now and get the whole trilogy, which continues in Stormchaser and Midnight Over Sanctaphrax.

Robbie Fischer
USA

Recommended Age: 10+

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