THE MASK WEARER

Chucking in characters, incidents and motifs from various mythologies and folktale traditions, Perro opens his Amos Daragon series—which runs to 12 volumes in the original French—with early exploits of his trickster hero against a brutal but stupid overlord (“ ‘I’m boiling water for dinner, my good lord. We’ll make a soup from stones!’ ”) and then a sorcerous man-snake (one of a race of shape-changing “humanimals”) and his army of gorgons. Along the way, young Amos picks up a man-bear sidekick (onomatopoeically named Beorf), along with the first of four elemental masks and the first of 16 “power stones” that will set him up as a “warrior of equilibrium,” charged with maintaining the balance between Good and a newly resurgent Evil. Aside from the tried-and-true borrowed elements, it’s all paint-by-numbers, tailor-made for audiences that prefer stock casts and comfortably predictable quests. Occasionally complicated names aside, it's best considered training wheels for fantasy readers. (Fantasy. 10-12)