I’ve been on somewhat of a children’s and young adult book kick lately. Keeping with that, I decided to give German author Cornelia Funke a try. I was less than enchanted with her first book, The Thief Lord but I really enjoyed her second book, Inkheart, which is really all about the love of one of my greatest loves: that of books.

Mortimer is a bookbinder. He lives with his twelve-year-old daughter Meggie. They’ve been on their own since Meggie was three. Mo (for Meggie never remembers calling her father anything else) doesn’t talk much about Meggie’s mother, and Meggie is perfectly content with just the two of them and their books.

One night a strange man with three scars on his face shows up in their yard calling Mo Silvertongue. It is this night that Meggie finds out just why Mo always refused to read aloud from books. The scarred man, a fire-eater named Dustfinger, warns Mo that Capricorn knows where he is and is going to come for him soon. Meggie finds out that Mo has the power to read things out of books when he reads the words aloud. It isn’t a power he knows how to control, but twelve years earlier, he read Dustfinger, a pale villain named Capricorn and his murderous henchman Basta out of a book called Inkheart. He soon realized, however, that for every person or thing he reads out of a book, something from his world must replace it, and that was how his wife disappeared.

Capricorn wants Mo to read the cruelest of all villains, the immortal Shadow, out of Inkheart, and Mo turns to the book’s author Fenoglio for help. Dustfinger wants desperately to return to his own world, regardless of the fate Fenoglio has written for him. When Meggie discovers that she too has this rare ability, Fenoglio helps her to devise a plan to save the people she loves.

Inkheart is, at its heart, a book about books. Each chapter begins with a short excerpt from different books and stories, often foreshadowing what will happen in the chapter to come. Mo is forced to read aloud from books other than the fictional Inkheart and brings gold from Treasure Island and a boy named Farid from 1001 Nights, who, unlike Dustfinger, has no desires to return to his story of origin.

The writing is simple enough for most fifth graders to read without problems, and unlike The Thief Lord, I didn’t feel like this lost anything in the translation from German to English. The story, though it feels complex at times with the story within the story, is also pretty simple. There are some truly villainous villains, and some references to some heinous acts of torture, though nothing is explicitly detailed.

I’ve been on the lookout recently for quality books with strong female characters, for my eight-year-old daughter to read. I’ve started a list of age appropriateness, and Inkheart is one I’ll recommend to her in a couple years. Until then, I’ll read the second book in the trilogy, Inkspell and look forward to the final book, Inkdeath due out sometime next year.

Happy reading!




Recommended: Yes

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