Inkheart: Cornelia Funke’s Story Within a Story, Where Reading Aloud Is Dangerous
Meggie, the daughter of a bookbinder, discovers that her father has a gift: when he reads aloud, fictional characters come to life. Characters literally leap off the page in Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, a fascinating fantasy and the first book of the Inkworld trilogy.
Author: Cornelia Funke
Title: Inkheart (Tintenherz, 2003)
Format: English paperback (Chicken House), 576 pages
Scope: First book of the Inkheart trilogy, followed by Inkspell and Inkdeath
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1912626845 (ASIN 1912626845)
A Mother Lost Inside a Book
Mo taught Meggie to read when she was very young, and the two share a deep love of books. When she was only three, her father read aloud from a book called Inkheart and brought its characters into the real world. At the same moment, her mother vanished into the pages of that novel.
Dustfinger and Capricorn
One of the story’s villains, Capricorn, now loose in our world, wants the book, the only link to Meggie’s mother. Dustfinger, another character from Inkheart, warns Mo that Capricorn is after him. But Dustfinger longs to return to the story he came from and will do almost anything to get back, so Mo and Meggie are never quite sure they can trust him. It is a tale of kidnapping, deceit, magic and murder, and a truly original one.
Silvertongue
Meggie’s father, Mo, is known to the villains as Silvertongue. Nine years before the story begins, he read aloud from a novel called Inkheart and brought out its characters, including the fire-juggler Dustfinger and the cruel Capricorn, while Meggie’s mother vanished into the book in exchange. Now Capricorn wants Mo to read for him again. Meggie, who is twelve, gradually discovers that she has inherited her father’s gift, with all its dangers.
A Book About Loving Books
Inkheart is a love letter to reading. Each chapter opens with a quotation from another book, from The Wind in the Willows to Peter Pan, and characters include Meggie’s great-aunt Elinor, a prickly collector who cares more for her library than for people, and Fenoglio, the elderly author of the book-within-the-book, who meets his own creations with mixed feelings.
Cornelia Funke
Funke, born in Germany in 1958, worked as an illustrator of other people’s books before writing her own, and she became internationally known with The Thief Lord, set in Venice. Inkheart appeared in German as Tintenherz in 2003 and in English the same year, translated by Anthea Bell, one of the most respected translators of children’s literature. The story continues in Inkspell and Inkdeath, and a film starring Brendan Fraser was released in 2008.
Who It Suits
Readers from about ten upwards who enjoy long, immersive fantasy, and adults who remember losing themselves in books as children. It is a big book, but its pace rarely flags.
Villains to Remember
Capricorn’s henchman Basta, with his knife and his superstitions, and the monstrous Shadow that Capricorn plans to summon give the story real menace, so the stakes never feel childish.
A Future Classic
This story within a story will appeal not only to fantasy fans but to every reader who enjoys mystery and adventure. Funke has created a book that could become a children’s classic, comparable to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time or C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Funke was already a popular author in Germany when she made her English debut with The Thief Lord, an adventure about a group of orphans surviving in Venice, which became a bestseller and won the American Library Association’s Batchelder Award for the best children’s book in translation. Inkheart was later filmed, and the publisher’s page notes the film is now on Netflix.
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