This is the first of what looks to be a trilogy based on the plot set-up, but there is no word on subsequent titles or release dates as of now. Which is a pity, because I would be on them like white on rice.
An earlier review of mine covered a book: The Lost Children, which I didn't rate too highly. This book is what that book could have been.
The Emerald Atlas is beautiful. A perfect complement to Lemony Snicket, the three children have been snatched from their parents at a very young age, supposedly to keep them safe, but reality doesn't always match up to expectations or suppositions.
Now older, the children have been dumped from orphanage to orphanage, and finally deposited into the hands of a strange pair of elderly caretakers, and nearly immediately fall through time into an adventure that seems more than they will ever be able to survive, let alone resolve.
The children are beautifully individualized: Kate is tough and proud, Michael is intelligent and quietly desperate, and Emma is a peerless fighter. The three use all of their strengths to make their way through a world gone dark and predatory, and emerge at the other end with an identity, and a sense of their own strength (which is good, because they also emerge with a quest waiting for them to complete.)
Lovely, lovely, lovely. Can't wait for the next ones, which I simply hope will live up to the quality of the first, and to my expectations!
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