The premise of this fantasy novel is a simple but an intriguing one:
What if, each time we become so involved with a book that we feel we know the characters for real and their world feels so vivid we think we can almost touch it, is it because those characters and that world are actually real? And what if a few people had the power to move things out of the pages of a book and into the real world?
Well, Meggie’s father, Mo, is one of those people. He’s a “silvertongue,” so he can move in and out of books simply by reading a story out loud. Meggie discovers this by eavesdropping on him as he talks to a stranger—Dustfinger. She doesn’t understand everything they’re talking about, but what she gets is enough to pique her curiosity.
Next day, father and daughter flee, hiding from Dustfinger. On the run, as Meggie learns of her father’s ability to read people and objects out of stories and into the real world, with the devastating side-effect of sometimes reading people into stories by mistake, she must come to grips with two other unsettling revelations: the story of how her mother disappeared and the discovery that she has inherited her father’s arcane talent.
In Inkheart, Funke manages to create an interesting and original secondary world, full of large and darkly scary villains and equally scary but small and petty little bad guys.
Yet, Meggie may not be the most likable of protagonists, making really bad choices more than once, but she’s a relatable character. I think children will find that Maggie thinks like them, which is perhaps one of the reasons why I found it hard to like her. Her fears and solutions feel child-like, naïve and too innocent to work, yet they do in the long run and the end of the book is both sweet and satisfying.
While the prose feels uneven, at times flowing nicely and carrying us along effortlessly. At times it is choppy and full of long paragraphs that are hard to follow. Yet, since this book was originally written in German, perhaps some of these issues are due to trying to translate the untranslatable and not the reflection of Funke’s writing skills.
Regardless, this was an interesting read. One I enjoyed and would recommend for children in the 9 to 12 years of age, as it may be a bit too scary for younger children and perhaps too family oriented for older ones.
Francisca Staines 