Friday

Review - Inkheart by Cornelia Funke


Paperback: 563 pages
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication date: 01 May 2005
ISBN13: 9780439709101

One cruel night, Meggie's father reads aloud from a book called INKHEART-- and an evil ruler escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. Meggie must learn to harness the magic that has conjured this nightmare. For only she can change the course of the story that has changed her life forever.

This is INKHEART--a timeless tale about books, about imagination, about life. Dare to read it aloud.
Inkheart isn't aimed at adults but it was entertaining enough and kept me reading to the end.

The cover of the book makes it appear like a light, fantasy story filled with fairies and nice things......but nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, there are a few fairies but only enough to fill a sentence or 3, the rest of the book is given over to dark, sinister types with murderous intent.

The concept is a fascinating one. The ability to read characters and things out from the pages of a book. As great as that sounds, the reality of it is more of a curse than a gift as the lead characters find out, and you're left wondering right up to the end how they can put things to right.

If this book has any flaws, it's perhaps that at times the pace stalls and is slow to pick up again, also I feel the villians seem to be a bit too one dimensional. Pain, suffering, misery and fear seem to be all there is to them but perhaps since they're a 'baddie' in a storybook, that's all they need ???

I wouldn't recommend it to be bumped to the top of anyone's TBR pile but it's a nice book to fill in the 'between books' times, that might crop up.

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