Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
Series: Inkheart #1
Format: Paperback
Goodreads
Reading Reckless made me realize, duh I should be finally finishing this trilogy! Yes I’ve read it before, in the dark days before I blogged. Mom and I both devoured it. I feel a little silly giving a summary of a book that I feel like most have heard of, it is a movie as well.
Meggie’s dad repairs old books but his relationship with the written word goes much farther. If he reads aloud sometimes things come out and that is what happened years ago when an evil man named Capricorn appeared in their living room years ago. Meggie is thrust into the kind of adventure that we prefer to experience from the safety of a nice reading chair and it is up to her to change the course of this story.
It’s a book about stories coming to life… I’d have a hard time not loving it even if it weren’t written by the fantastic Cornelia Funke. Meggie is the perfect protagonist, at 12 she is young enough that the younger readers will be drawn into the book but she is precocious enough that everybody loves her. Around the time I read this the first go round I was pretty convinced that I was going to end up a lot like Elinor, now the only difference is that Ben is around so that if I ever do get lost in a giant house full of books he’ll come looking for me. The “real world” characters are very much like real people: sometimes you love them, they make you laugh, sometimes you want to bop them on the head, sometimes you hate them. Mo, Elinor, Meggie, and Fengolio are very real. Dustfinger I would say is on par with them. Farid has the beginnings of being real. Then there is Capricorn. He is as he was written, pitiless and cold hearted. Funke writes such gorgeous imagery, and then of course there are the literary references which make me want to read even more books… Yes I love it absolutely.
I’m not big on books I love being made into movies. Even if I like the movie then their vision is now in my brain preventing me from using my full imagination. Luckily it had been long enough since I saw the movie that the only thing I remembered was that the people brought out by Darius had words on them, which I thought was kind of cool and a good way to show flaw without overdoing it on the face makeup. So I looked up the movie after I finished like a bad girl and suddenly remembered that Paul Bettany was Dustfinger. I love Paul Bettany, partially because he is good at characters you have a love hate relationship with like Dustfinger. Anyway… like many book series the film set didn’t make it past number 1 but I am off to read number 2!
