Book Review: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Genre: fantasy, adventure, juvenile
Pages: 503
First Published: 2003
Personal Rating: Frigate

This book has been topping out the Best-Of lists for quite some time now, and yet for some reason, it's taken me a while to review it. My apologies to my visitors!

Inkheart is fun. Pure and simple. It's beautifully poetic, and dramatically magical. While there are few who might say it deserves a literary award, it shines as a credit to its author, Cornelia Funke, who is fast becoming one of my new favorite writers.

For those of you who don't actually know what the book's about, please continue.

Some people can make books seem to come alive when they read aloud.

Others can actually make them come alive.

Meggie's father, Mo, is one of those people. And not only can he call characters and creatures out of any book he reads, he can also read people into them.

While this may sound incredibly fun and particularly fascinating, it can also be quite dangerous. Which is why Meggie's mother disappeared, and why Mo has never read a book aloud to Meggie since she was three.

The story follows young Meggie, who lives with her father, Mo, and later, his aunt Elinor. Meggie has never known her mother, or at least, not for a very long time. One day, Mo tells Meggie that they're off to visit his aunt, Elino. With no answers and very little explanation at all, Meggie is whisked off to the old lady's library of a mansion, out in the middle of nowhere. The really mysterious thing is that Mo has finally found a book he's been looking for, apparently one of very few copies left. It's in brown packaging, and Mo keeps it away from her at all costs.

What's in the mysterious package? and why doesn't Mo, her father of all people, want her to see it? And, even more mysterious, why won't he read to her anymore?

And who, after all, are the shadowy men who show up at Elinor's door one night, looking for that same package?

While this story is a bit slow to begin with, it is in the end a high-adventure, fantasty mystery with questions and bookish love oozing out of its pages from beginning to end. It strives to ask the question: who controls the story...the reader, or the book?

Particularly thrilling are the side characters of Dustfinger, a fire-eating entertainer who forces Mo to face his past; Elinor, the old maid book collector, who swears that books have always been her only children; Farid, the young Arabian boy who is suddenly dropped into our world when Mo reads A Thousand and One Arabian Nights; and Fenoglio, the grandfatherly writer and storymaster who know the real story behind Inkheart and the fate of all the characters within.....