The sea voyage narrative dates back to the Odyssey and beyond, and has provided the backbone for countless ballads, poems, legends, oral tales, memoirs, and novels. In Choir Boats, the first novel in a new fantasy trilogy by folklorist Daniel A. Rabuzzi, young readers get a crash course in that rich global tradition, along with a seminar’s worth of material on world religion and mythology.

The novel opens in a London shipping office in 1812, where merchant Barnabas McDoon receives a strange package that contains a book, a box, a letter, and a key. The book is a compendium of travel narratives documenting the distant land of Yount, a continent that the well-travelled Barnabas and his partner Sanford have never seen on a map. The letter’s unknown correspondent promises Barnabas a chance to atone for the mistake that has defined his adult life, but only if he will sail to Yount with the enclosed key.

Barnabas’s journey and the various machinations that ensnare his orphaned niece and nephew into the plot provide Rabuzzi with ample opportunity to school readers in folkore and religion, referencing sources as diverse as classical Indian mythology, the Book of Ezekiel, Shakespeare, Dickens, and William Hope Hodgson’s dark fantasy classic The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Many of Rabuzzi’s characters share his love of reading and history, and occasionally indulge their passions in talky passages that stall the narrative momentum.

The Choir Boats is a fine opening volume of a seagoing saga that measures up to its multiple reference points. With the necessary back stories, alliances, schemes, and counter-schemes set in motion, Rabuzzi will hopefully devote future instalments to the sheer joy of storytelling.