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Review: Inkheart
Friday, May 6th, 2016 01:50 pm
Coeur d'encre by Cornelia Funke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Twelve-year-old Meggie learns that her father, who repairs and binds books for a living, can “read” fictional characters to life when one of those characters abducts them and tries to force him into service.
Characters from books literally leap off the page in this engrossing fantasy. Meggie has had her father to herself since her mother went away when she was young. Mo taught her to read when she was five, and the two share a mutual love of books. He can “read” characters out of books. When she was three, he read aloud from a book called Inkheart and released characters into the real world. At the same time, Meggie’s mother disappeared into the story. This “story within a story” will delight not just fantasy fans, but all readers who like an exciting plot with larger-than-life characters.
So this book is kind of hard for me to review right now.
I read it for the first time when I was twelve, and I remember loving the emphasis that was put on books and on loving books–as someone who used to get in trouble for reading under my desk instead of listening to the teacher, and later got made fun of because I couldn’t get my nose out of books, it was a real moment of validation for me.
Since then, I’ve reached a place where I don’t need to be told loving books makes me special–in fact, I’m actively against that mentality because I think it drives people who aren’t too confident about books away from them.
So yeah, that bit didn’t really work for me anymore, especially considering it brings along several monologues that I can’t for the life of me imagine coming out of anyone’s mouth in real life–and if they did, I’d just be rolling my book-loving eyes to high heavens.
That being said, the story is compelling (though it would be faster without the “lookit how much we love books!” parts) and the characters are interesting.
In fact, one of the most interesting things about this book is how cruel some of the characters–including some of the “good guys” can be. Dustfinger takes great pleasure in torturing Basta (he has his reasons and I can sympathize with them, but it’s still cruel), Elinor and Mortimer explicitely threaten to kill some of the villains, etc… it’s more blunt than what you’d expect in kids lit, which is an interesting take, although not necessarily one everyone wants to expose their child(ren) to.
All in all, I’m intrigued by the worl hinted at in inkheart (the one inside the book. although I have to admit, after a point, hearing the characters praise Inkheart even if it’s technically a “different” book, got kind of long) and I wouldn’t mind reading more about where Dustfinger comes from, what his life was like, etc.
Meggie, for some reason, didn’t catch my interest as much as she did the first time around, possibly because I didn’t really feel much of her personality beyond ‘I love Mo’ and I’m hoping this will be corrected in later books.
I’ve debated about the note, whether I should fall down on two stars, but considering the climax managed to set me on edge even though I knew what happened and I didn’t feel all that immersed in the rest of the book, I’m leaving it at three.
