FERGUS CRANE

The creators of the Edge Chronicles open a new series aimed at a younger audience with this tale of a lad who discovers that his teachers are all pirates. Supplemented with many hand-drawn letters, clippings and scenes drawn in great detail with almost invisibly fine inked lines, the story takes a wandering course as a mechanical flying horse takes Fergus to the mysterious Fateful Voyage Trading Company. There he meets three talking penguins and an inventor uncle he didn’t know he had, learns that his father had been lost while searching for fabulously valuable fire diamonds and then travels to a remote archipelago to rescue his classmates, who had been kidnapped by his father’s treacherous crew to gather the diamonds from volcanic caverns. Despite the elaborate black-and-white art and frequent artificial efforts to pump up the suspense, readers aren’t likely to stay the course; Stewart spends too much time introducing a large cast of characters who mostly just pass in review, and the melodramatic bits don’t arrive until very late. Missable. (Fantasy. 10-12)