One day Egbert’s dad has the whole family dress their best for a trip. He is meeting with his attorney, who lives on Sunrise Island (an island full of rich people located near Deadweather), to get a piece of advice regarding a map that he found. Shortly afterwards, the wealthiest man on the entire Island, Roger Pembroke, offers the family a fancy lunch and invites them to stay at his mansion instead of in a grungy hotel room. Egg meets Pembroke's daughter, Millicent, whom he immediately falls in love with.

 

The next day, Roger Pembroke offers the family a ride in his hot air balloon. With the family tutor hopping on as well as Egg’s enormous brother, sister and father and Egg himself, there is too much weight so the tutor jumps off, and Egg decides to as well so he can spend the day with his crush instead. The balloon never returns and Egg’s family is assumed to be dead.

 

Now that he is all alone, Egg spends weeks on end at the Pembroke mansion getting to know Millicent and enjoying happy life. Then, while out on a walk one of Pembroke’s associates attempts to throw Egg off a cliff. Shaken by this turn of events, Egg runs off which eventually results in him meeting Guts, who is a one handed pirate ship cabin boy. Together they search for the hidden map that Eggs dad was concerned about. Guts believes that the map will lead to vast amounts of treasure. Egg strives to stay alive and wants to find out what he did to make Pembroke want him dead. 

 

Eventually they find the map and to make sure Pembroke never gets hold of it Egg memorizes it and burns the map. They flee from Pembroke and his soldiers on a boat that Millicent had organised to pick them up and take them to the ‘New Lands’, which is where the map is referring to.  
Themes: betrayal love and friendship- Egg and Guts learn to become friends with each other and Egg is betrayed by Roger Pembroke, who is the father of the girl he loves, Millicent.
Evaluation of Writing Style: Rodkey's writing style is very unique, the way he describes characters using a handful of similes and metaphors and a whole variety of other language techniques. He also manages to make the speech in the book sound like it is coming from a thirteen year old.
Unique: this novel was unique to me because it had a lot of different techniques of writing within it. While I was reading I found some plot-holes but at the end they all seemed to be tied up which made it so much more enjoyable and made me want to read the rest of the trilogy.