Inkdeath | Nishita's Rants and Raves

Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke

Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke is that last of the 3 books in her Ink trilogy. I have reviewed the first 2 books, here and here.

Note:This review assumes you have already read the first two books in the series.

This book starts off almost immediately where Inkspell ends. Farid, Dustfinger’s faithful friend is searching for a way to bring him back from the land of the dead. Mo, Reza, and Meggie are struggling to live in a world where the Adderhead is living an immortal life, but is still after Mo. Mo is becoming more and more like the Bluejay, the heroic character who has to save Inkworld from the Adderhead’s excesses, and undo the damage that he has done in Inkspell by making the Adderhead immortal. Orpheus is the greedy guz who is using his powers to write himself into a powerful life in Inkworld.

Sounds like too many plot threads? well, Cornelia Funke juggles them all quite skilllfully, I must say. The book does start off slow (just like the rest of the books in this series), but then builds up into quite an exciting middle and satisfying finale.

That said, the book still disappointed me on a couple of fronts. I hated that character sketches fell completely by the wayside here. Farid, Meggie, and some other key characters such as the Black Prince were strangely insipid. I didn’t mind too much about Meggie who I always disliked thoroughly. But, I did not expect the Black Prince to be reduced to little more than a bystander in the finale of the novel. And Brianna is nothing more than a beautiful pawn.

The story focusses almost entirely on Mo and Dustfinger’s heroics, and while they are entertaining all right, I would have liked the focus to be on others as well. I did love Reza in this book though.

Some other things that grated on me:

I hated Mo’s name. I mean, what kind of a name is that for a hero? Cornelia, there was a reason why Walt Disney considered and eventually discarded the name “Mortimer” for his iconic Mickey Mouse character. The frequent “Oh Mo(s)” uttered by Meggie added to my irritation.
I hated the numerous nicknames used in this book. At times, it really confused me. Mo is also called Silvertongue, Blue Jay, and Jay. Dustfinger also has a couple of nicknames. It was a bit of a trial keeping up with who was named what.

Apart from these minor annoyances, I quite liked the book. It was an apt ending for the series.

Final thoughts: this is a good (but not great) Fantasy series. I enjoyed reading these books, but it is unlikely that these books will linger too much in my memory.

About these ads

Inkheart Cover

The success of the Harry Potter series seems to have created a spurt in the growth of Young Adult (YA) Fantasy literature. Numerous writers (some good and some not-so-good) have piggy-backed on this formula.

And one of them is Cornelia Funke – author of the Ink series. The series consists of the following novels:

Inkheart
Inkspell
Inkdeath

The premise of the book is :

The hero Mo can bring characters from a book to life when he reads a book out aloud. However, when he does bring someone out of a novel, something in the real world has to take its place in the book.

When Mo’s daughter was three, he was reading to his wife from a rather rough fantasy book called Inkheart. Three grown men from the story appear while Mo’s wife, a futon, and a stuffed animal disappear from the living room. Mo goes into hiding, because the men he read out of the story are the very evil bad guys from the book, and he makes it his life’s work to try to read his wife back out of the book. The bad guys are after Mo because some of them want to get back into the book, while others want him to read out treasure from different stories.

The story starts off a little slow, but then builds up into a good climax. The characters are a little simplistic but I suppose it is done deliberately based on the target audience. My favorite characters turned out to be the main villain Capricorn – so called because he was born under its star, and Dustfinger. Dustfinger is one of the best etched characters in the novel, and he and his protege (Farid) actually provide all the interest in the novel. Dustfinger is not the bad guy, but he is not the good guy either. He just makes his moves based on his self-interest. The shades of grey in his character and the pathos of his situation (he is in love with Mo’s wife, and he has been read out of the book and cannot return back even though he wants to) actually make the novel far deeper and more interesting. The hero and his family are pretty much cardboard characters and not at all interesting.

What I was expecting when I opened the novel was something on the lines of “The Golden Compass” series by Philip Pullman, which is complex enough for adults to also read and enjoy. However, Inkheart is definitely for the pre-teens to late teens age group with not too much for adults.

Even the literary references (and there are many here) are to books enjoyed by children such as Peter Pan and Treasure Island. However, I must say that I liked the quotations at the beginning of each chapter from other classic novels. They were very relevant to the actual content of the chapter and also they were from some of my favorite classic children’s novels.

In my opinion, this is a good start to a series. Hopefully, the other books are more advanced and complex. My hopes are high because I remember that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone also started slowly – setting the stage for the rest of the series.

Also, the various reviews for Inkspell and Inkdeath are pretty good. So, looking forward to continuing the series