Book Review: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Published in 2003

534 pages

3 Stars

Goodreads Book Depository

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 I’m finally back after a very long and completely unplanned hiatus, things really didn’t go my way in the second half of last year and I had to take some time to work on my mental health and now that the explanations done lets get down to the review.

To kick things off and start the New Year in my favourite way I read a classic fantasy book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. That book was of course Inkheat by Cornelia Funke and in all honest I did see the movie many a year ago and I loved it.  That made things hard when reading Inkheart, because it really isn’t the fastest paced book and more tends to dawdle along and check out the scenery where the movie is quiet action packed. So after all my thoughts on what the book was going to be were thrown out the window I started to really enjoy Inkheart and its fantastic descriptive scenery, characters and world.

Following the journey of a young girl called Meggie who discovers her dad Mo as she’s always called him has a strange talent for accidently reading characters and things out of books. This leads to Meggie and Mo having a run in with some very bad guys who aren’t from this world but were once accidently read out of a book called Inkheart. Chaos occurs and we are led on a magical adventure following some really pleasant characters.

Now this book really is up there on the page count with my edition sliding in at 534 pages making it quiet a hefty tome. But gosh is it filled with details, from the covers of books, which were so elegantly described that I had little fangirl moments over some of them. Sometime I honest to goodness forgot this was set in our world it was so magically described, I get happy just thinking about how beautiful it all way.

Getting down to the nitty gritty part of why I gave such a wonderful sounding book only a 3 star rating which in my book equates to an “eh, it was okay” is hard there wasn’t a particular reason. I really just could not get into the story as deeply as I wanted to. The characters didn’t feel as life like as I hoped them to and I really had to push myself to finish the last 200ish pages, which is the movies fault for giving away the ending.

To wrap things up this book is definitely worth a read just to get a taste of the beautiful writing but be warned if you have seen the movie it might ruin it for it for you. My favourite characters by far are Meggie and Fenoglio, they really added that extra something to me that some of the other characters seemed to be missing.