“Twig sat on the floor between his mother’s knees, and curled his toes in the thick fleece of the tilder rug.”

From Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell’s The Edge Chronicles: Beyond the Deepwoods.

Despite being raised by woodtrolls all his life, young Twig has always felt the desire to be a sky pirate, but until his adoptive woodtroll mother tells him that she found him as a baby and raised him as her own. Twig’s mother tells the boy to travel through the Deepwoods to stay with family while he sorts through this new, life-changing information, but when Twig accidentally leaves the safety of the path, he enters the realm of the Deepwoods’ dangerous creatures, spirits, and the dreaded Gloamglozer. Over the next few days, Twig faces a wide variety of deadly creatures, villages filled with strange Deepwoods dwellers, an unexpected prophecy from a caterbird, and an injured banderbear that soon becomes Twig’s friend. Twig’s life is repeated placed in danger, but he finds that rescue often comes from a lone compassionate members of the group that has captured, stopped, or tried to eat him. When Twig is finally reaches the edge of the Deepwoods, where he meets crashed sky pirates led by Qunintinius Verginix, who is known as Cloud Wolf in the pirate world. Twig instantly feels a connection with Quintinius, but when he is left behind at the start of a forest fire, Twig comes face-to-face with the Gloamglozer who offers Twig an impossible, life-altering decision.

This fantastical adventure series is built of several character-following trilogies put together to create a complete world. The illustrations scattered throughout the book highlight characters and places that are definitely odd, but it also seamlessly creates the foundation for the highly imaginative world. As the first book in the Twig Trilogy, Beyond the Deepwoods creates a captivating story that will instantly pull readers into the action-packed fantasy world of The Edge Chronicles.