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Title: Inkheart
ISBN: 0807220108
Author:
Cornelia Caroline Funke
Publicate Date: 2004-06
Publish: 2004-06
List Price: $85.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Audio CD
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $165.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $83.95
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Sucks you in
A lot of teenage girls are claiming that the book Twilight by Stephanie Meyer "sucked them in from the first page". Funny, because Twilight didn't work for me (but that is neither here nor there)...but Inkheart did.
As a lover of books since before I could even read properly, I love the attention to details and description that Funke puts into this novel, and the shout-outs to classics (such as Meggie and Mo using Elvish writing from The Lord of the Rings, my favorite book). I couldn't begin to explain why, but the style captured my attention from page one and I found myself engrossed in the Inkworld. The plot is both fascinating and innovative: what if you could read a character out of a book, and go into it yourself? I've often wanted to meet my favorite characters, but Funke put a great spin on it by also having the villain of the piece come into our world as well as the protagonist and exploring the darker side of this wonderful idea.
I remain, however, unsure about the movie - but I'll give it a chance, anyway. It's the least I can do.
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2: Fantastic
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke (Hardcover)
Ok so I have to admit this book started off slow. Its boring for about the first half. But I stuck it out and read until the end and was so glad I did. This book is so magical you can imagine everything Cornelia Funke wrote down. This book made me think so much it was truly amazing. I love all of Cornelia Funke's books and I'm currently working on Inkspell the second book in the trilogy. If you like fairy tales and magic then this is the book for you!
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3: Couldn't stop reading, but nothing was left to think about
I am 46 years old. I read the book (about 500 pages) in two days or so. So I must admit it was fascinating. Nevertheless, it was a great disappointment, considering the Thief Lord.
The main problem is that most of the characters are not interesting, two dimensional, and not very credible. So I read it in one breadth and all the time felt it isn't really good.
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4: Forgettable
As an adult, reviewing a children's book is fraught with danger. It's all too easy to forget you're not the target audience and don't necessarily see things the way the author intended. Having said that, it seems the most successful children's books these days are those that manage to appeal to both old and young alike (Quidditch, anyone?), and so on that basis I feel at least partly qualified to write a review. Any kids reading this who think I've totally missed the point of the book - please forgive me - you too will be old and out of touch one day.
Inkheart is a very long book. At a whopping 500 plus pages it ranks as one of the longer children's books around. Unfortunately a lot of this length is taken up with unnecessary exposition, narration and description, often slowing the action to a crawl or even a total standstill. There really is a lot to be said for crediting your readers with intelligence, but the author too often spoon feeds us exactly what to think, imagine and feel instead of giving us the basics and letting us do the rest. A good editor with a pair of scissors and an evil grin could easily have reduced the page count to 200 or so, creating a much better story in the process.
As for the characters, I found the good guys to be generally likable and to an extent believable. The baddies were a different category altogether. Capricorn and his cronies are straight out of the corny stereotypical villains handbook, complete with black clothing, and as a result they come across as more comical than evil. I kept expecting Mini-Me to leap out of the shadows and make an appearance, particularly when the age old clich?? of scheduling your enemies execution at a later date appeared. The author is clearly gifted with a good imagination, I just wish she had used it more when developing the protagonists.
Seeing as I've probably upset enough people already, I may as well press on with a pedantic point. I had a beef with her use of elvish from the Lord of the Rings. At one point the characters apparently write messages to each other in this language, but the reader is never shown the actual words used. In my opinion if a writer is cheeky enough to make use of Tolkien they should take the time to do it properly, otherwise it comes across as lazy appropriation of a great body of work. Surely it wouldn't have been too difficult to employ the services of a translator to actually put the messages in Quenya or Sindarin, it would have gone a long way towards giving the author credibility.
Overall, the premise of this story is exciting and original, but for me the problems mentioned above turned what could have been a gem into an extremely ordinary and forgettable book. I give it one star for the concept, but none for its execution.
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5: Inkheart
For anyone who loves to read, whether child or adult, this is a great fantasy story. I wish I'd had this when I was young. It has the potential of becoming a classic. Bought this for my 12 year old niece for Christmas.
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