Inkdeath (Inkheart) (Hardcover)

~ Cornelia Funke (Author)
Key Phrases: old chamber, two glass men, minstrel woman, Black Prince, White Women, Strong Man (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This concluding volume in Funke's bestselling trilogy picks up where Inkspell left off, but sputters for a hundred pages filling in backstory. (Even then, an addendum is needed to identify a cast of 114 characters.) The Inkworld, full of dark magic, is under siege; the savagery of the Adderhead and his minions now extends to taking all the peasants' children until somebody delivers, as ransom, the Bluejay, a Robin Hood–style character whose identity has been assumed by Mo, Meggie's father (it was Mo who started all the trouble by reading several villains right out of the book-within-a-book, Inkheart—don't even consider reading this series out of order). The Inkheart author, Fenoglio, now living in Inkworld himself, has turned to drink; the odious Orpheus, when he's not under a maid's skirt, rewrites Fenoglio's work (editors!) to benefit himself. The interesting metafictional questions—can we alter destiny? shape our own fate?—are overwhelmed by the breakneck action, yet the villains aren't fully realized. More disappointingly, the formerly feisty Meggie, barely into her teens, has little to do but choose between two suitors. Funke seems to have forgotten her original installment was published for children. Ages 9–up. (Oct.)
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From School Library Journal

Grade 5–9—This final volume in the trilogy returns readers to Inkworld and its wide cast of characters. Under the rule of the evil Adderhead, it is a bleak and dangerous place. General gloominess bogs down the pace initially, as several characters agonize, sometimes tiresomely, over past regrets and the dire uncertainty of the future. Meggie, despite her gift of magical reading, remains a disappointingly dull protagonist, but other characters are quite compelling. Her bookbinding father, for instance, emerges as a swashbuckling outlaw, and, when he brings the fire-dancer Dustfinger back from the dead, things get really interesting. The assortment of villains is vivid and frightening, especially Mortola, who can change shape, and the immortal Adderhead. Even more intriguing is Mo, who evolves into a powerful and complex scoundrel as he explores the evil potential of his unique ability to make up stories, then read them into reality. The finale includes a thoroughly engrossing climax as the Adderhead and Mo meet their doom, though a subplot involving Meggie and her companions is less exciting. Despite occasional weaknesses in plotting and characterization, Funke successfully explores ideas of fate, free will, and the power of story in a multilayered tale with many dramatic moments, bringing the series to a satisfying conclusion. Summaries of the first two books and a list of names and places are provided for those new to the series, but this last installment will be appreciated most by readers who start with the first title.—Steven Engelfried, Multnomah County Library, OR
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 9-12
  
• Hardcover: 656 pages
• Publisher: The Chicken House; 1St Edition edition (September 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0439866286
• ISBN-13: 978-0439866286
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (102 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,125 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funke is on a serious roll, September 26, 2008

By	She who Reviews "I, the Reviewer" (E.H.T., N.J. United States) - See all my reviews

I love the Inkheart trilogy, I seriously can't get enough of it! I must admit at first I was somewhat reluctant to read the conclusion to the trilogy, afraid it might be a letdown as most serie-enders are becoming, but it was as excellent as the first and second books (not to mention the breathtaking cover). Its excellently paced, descriptive, suspenseful, and keeps you flipping the pages, just salivating for the finish. I admit it started a little slow in my opinion, but it definitely picked up and kept my interest; I just couldn't put it down. I don't really want to give anything away, except that this is an amazing book, and you cannot miss out on it.

48 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sad to see it end this way--spoilers, January 2, 2009

By	R. Reece (Orinda, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Perhaps this book is payback for Cornelia Funke allowing filmmakers to destroy "Inkheart" for their, I don't know, convenience maybe, a la "Eragon." This book reads as though Ms. Funke struggled with the burden of tying up a thousand loose ends in her immense story-world, struggled and surrendered.

I was the reader who brought to life the "Inkheart" trilogy, reading aloud to my family. We came to love the Inkworld in all its rich detail, warmly fleshed-out characters, and fairy tale roster of fantasy creatures. We enjoyed indulging in the Inkworld despite all of the author's wrong turns, and anyone who read the first two books may feel the same.

The first book was marvelous, enthralling. The second, even more consuming, we couldn't wait for reading time each night, though I had to omit large portions of Ms. Funke's gore from the reading to little ears (while also deleting myriad "good heavens" and other too-frequently repeated phrases, perhaps unfortunate artifacts of the translation from German).

With "Inkdeath," the characters' continual despair and sadness through the first one-half of the book became a running joke with my audience. It got to the point where every time they heard the words "despair," or "cry," my listeners laughed out loud. Yes, 300 pages were too many to establish that life sucks inside a dark story. Real people find ways to cope. Storybook people should too.

Ms. Funke's Inkworld departed the second volume, "Inkspell," with a fistful of teasers. Orpheus entered the Inkworld, Dustfinger departed, leaving devoted Farid desperate to conjure him back. The Adderhead was left immortal, an untenable situation, while Cosimo, his double and his father were all dead, Lombrica taken over by Argenta. Fenoglio and all the Folcharts were inside the Inkworld, save the ultimate book fanatic Elinor. Basta was dead, but Mortola was still at large.

Ms. Funke concealed from us, in "Inkspell," Mo's sabotage of the book of immortality and anticipation that the villain's demise was imminent. Why she withheld this key detail until "Inkdeath" is hard to understand, unless she conceived it in the interim. We had been left wondering why Mo would do such a towering wrong as to hand the story's arch villain endless life, with only a vague notion of undoing it someday. Otherwise, the act was selfish and inconsistent with his character.

"Inkspell" was a fascinating exploration of the idea of entering the very story that one is reading. One of the most intriguing elements was how the author, Fenoglio, failed in his attempts to control the Inkworld by writing more pieces for his mystically endowed readers to bring to life. Fenoglio underestimated the complexity of the world he imagined, failed repeatedly to grasp how his book (or the readers) had merely set a world in motion, a world rapidly gaining its own logically consistent life.

From this point, Ms. Funke chose to spend the entirety of "Inkdeath" marching ponderously toward the undoing of the Adderhead's immortality. She struggles with the scale of her story and loses many of her characters along the way. Entire chapters are wasted telling us how Elinor pines to join her relations in the Inkworld, the reader Darius conveniently nearby as the obvious setup for what comes next. Meggie, central character of the first two novels, is a cardboard cutout of her former self, with a new and entirely irrelevant love interest perhaps serving as an apology for why she's uninvolved in deciding how this whole thing turns out. Farid never even puts up a fight to keep her. Clearly, Ms. Funke lost interest in these characters, which is offensive to readers who came to love them.

Obviously Dustfinger comes back, but not by the fast-turning-trite path of the reader's art, not by Fenoglio's reworking, or via Orpheus's manipulations. This is a fine turn by Ms. Funke, reviving Dustfinger with strings attached, not violating the strictures that had prevented Fenoglio from necromancing his beloved Cosimo.

But in the end, Dustfinger's presence is pretty much a distraction. We never get an enduring reunion of Dustfinger with his wife, Roxane, no full reconciliation between Dustfinger and his daughter Brianne. Dustfinger does little to decide the conclusion and acts pretty much as a red herring.

The wondrous innovation of "Inkheart" was Mortimer Folchart, the book doctor whose voice had unpredictable, dangerous power when used to read aloud. His voice...did it open the door to a world that already existed, or did it give life to the otherwise dead printed word? Rich innovation by Ms. Funke, wasted thereafter. Throughout the rest of the series, Mo never again used the power of his voice to do anything. Appalling oversight. Conceivably, Mo could have read characters out of any book that existed in the Inkworld, but that avenue was unexplored.

Instead, other readers--Meggie, Orpheus, even the milquetoast Darius--were allowed to perform the act with increasing nonchalance. Ms. Funke merely dismissed the previously ominous risks involved--you know, the one that deposited Resa Folchart into the Inkworld in the first place. How did those risks change when reading about the same story that one was inside? We never learned.

Many pages are wasted on Fenoglio turned pathetic drunk lost in his failures, when any author would more likely remain endlessly fascinated with the ability to interact with characters he himself had written. This is a plot conceit used by Ms. Funke to pad a story that needed no padding, had plenty of characters to explore. She temporarily suspended Fenoglio's ability to write so as to explain why he wasn't trying to regain control of his story. Fenoglio already had experienced spectacular failure; no need to waste thousands of words explaining why he might be having a hard time deciding what to do next.

Instead of indulging in her most developed characters, Ms. Funke elaborates on Orpheus, Princess Violante, and her awful son Jacopo.

Violante has to be fleshed out if she's to inherit rule over the Inkworld once her father passes. All in all, she is a bore. Jacopo goes from being an annoyance to taking some of the most decisive actions in the entire series. The story turns on Jacopo! Perhaps the author thought this clever. Depriving the story's better characters of these significant actions left them lacking. Surely Dustfinger, or the Black Prince, deserved a hand in deciding the outcome.

Orpheus is a satisfyingly repugnant villain whose end never comes, leaving open the future of this series. This is hard to stomach. Given that everyone remains to live in Fenoglio's story, why wouldn't Orpheus continue to torment them with distortions of Fenoglio's words? After 683 pages, "Inkdeath" comes to an abrupt halt without resolving any but the most obvious plotlines.

Ms. Funke was so good at departing from convention in her first two books, I wish she had done so again and dispatched the Adderhead within the first hundred pages of "Inkdeath." Life after his passing should have been the conclusion that got fleshed out. The battle between Orpheus and Fenoglio to write the future of the Inkworld! The largely forgotten argument over how and when to return to the real world! What becomes of Dustfinger and Roxane! Meggie's potential as reader and writer, hinted at in "Inkspell" but never elaborated! The story that should have been written all got crammed into a few dismissive paragraphs at the end.

I thank Cornelia Funke for creating this wonderful set of people and places. They are powerful fuel for any good imagination, and for many years my family and I will keep the Inkworld alive in our minds, working to imagine where this story could have gone.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book over all, not as good as the first two, October 19, 2008

By	Kathryn Kramer - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I thought Inkdeath was a good book, but it was not nearly as good as the first two. For some reason, Funke chose to give Meggie a much less important role, taking most of the character's depth away as well. I think this was one of the only things that took away from the book. The beginning was also really boring, and the characters were so untrue to their roles in past books that they hardly seemed like the same characters at all. Other than that, I think the book was extremely well written, with many new engaging characters to enjoy. The ending was satisfactory, and the plot well thought out and exciting. I just wish Funke hadn't changed the characters themselves to fit the plot.