Reckless
Cornelia Funke
Genre: fantasy
Audience: Ages 12+ (with some mature concepts)
Rating: 2.5/5
I love Cornelia Funke. The Inkheart trilogy ranks up there in my "favourites". However, I did not love this book. I should have - it had all the elements of something I would enjoy - fairytale references, dark fantasy, a mirror reflected into ours. A curse. What it suffered from was poor plotting and poor writing. Is this how Funke's work usually is? Or is it the fault of the Translator (Not Anthea Bell, as her previous novels had been)? Who knows? Whatever it was, this felt like only half a book. It started introducing Jacob, one of the Protagonists to the Mirrorworld - a faerie tale world through the looking glass. It then jumped 12 years into the future when Jacob had been visiting on a regular basis, only to have his younger brother follow him and subsequently be cursed by a dark fairy to turn into one of the stone people, the Goyl. Constant inferences were made to events and adventures Jacob had participated in the past, but the present was a choppy shambles of unfinished sentences. I found my attention - and thus my comprehension - wandering throughout and forced myself to re-read several pages.
Another thing of note - although I found this in the "children's" section it is not really a children's book. Will and Jacob are adults, Jacob engages in several (albeit quite subtle) sexual encounters in the book. However, the writing style is too simple to be an adult's book. So I'm going to classify it as Young Adult, although that doesn't feel quite right either...
Cornelia, you've let me down.
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