Foundling

I just finished re-reading (or re-listening in my case) because I realized I never finished the series. It's been years since I last read Foundling but I remembered that the book was fantastic and my memory did not disappoint. It's about a young orphan boy who sets off on a journey full of twists and turns to become a lamplighter for the empire. The lamplighter life isn't what he wants but without any other prospects that's the life that is chosen for him. He encounters many dangerous people and monsters on his journey to get to the lamplighter HQ and that's the fun of the book. If you can get a copy of this book with the illustrations I would recommend it because even years later I still remember how cool the illustrations where.

Rossamünd Bookchild (I would so much love to be part of his family) has spent his life in an orphanage, but he's finally been assigned his career—he is to be a lamplighter in a far-away city. He lives in a world with monsters everywhere, and, to defeat them, a great many people have become monster-hunters, and the tattoos in the book title are signs on a monster-hunter of monster kills. There is a lot of machinery with biological origins, and a lot of humans have had biological adaptations surgically added.

Of all the books on the 1001 Children's Books You Must Read list (and there are 1001 of them!) this was the book I was dreading the most. That title. That cover. Neither of those had any appeal for me. But was I ever wrong? This was so good that I'd be willing to break my Personal Reading Code and read on in a series.