When I first heard of Claudia Funke's Inkheart series, I heard wonderful reviews from other middle school English teachers and kept it in my mind. After reading the first two books, Inkheart and Inkspell, a few months later, I am declining to read the finale, Inkdeath. While I liked the first book well enough, Inkspell was a slog and I considered putting it down at multiple points after the first hundred pages.
The basic plot is that Mo, AKA Silvertongue, is father to Meggie and a bookbinder. He travels hither and yon, replacing binding on books. In the modern times, when mobile phones exist. While these service exist for libraries, specifically academic libraries that purchase books for over $100, this is not a common profession and lent an aura of unbelievability, even for a fantasy novel. This detail, and the way the characters from this world lived immediately irritated me, but I had heard good things about the series, so I opened my mind to a good story. Mo's wife is not around, and after a mysterious stranger appears, he finally tells Meggie where her mother is. When Mo reads aloud, he can read things and people out of books, but he cannot control how he does this, and something comparable leaves this world, presumably for the book. When Meggie was a baby, he was reading Inkheart aloud, and several character came out, and Meggie's mother disappeared. The characters from the book that came into this world include Dustfinger, a firebreather and dancer, Capricorn, a villain who wants Mo to read out another evil character, and some minions. The first novel concerns the defeat of Capricorn and has many amusing part with a book-worshipping aunt. The two books I read would appeal to most book and fantasy lovers. Inkheart concludes with some of the novel-within-a-novel's characters still in the real world, but most vanquished, and could have ended there satisfactorily.
Unfortunately, Funke decided to tie up every loose end, taking all the characters back into the fantasy novel, starting wars, creating political schemes, and generally dragging down the entire action. I finished the book, but very slowly, and only to see if I might be at all interested in the finale. I was not.
If you love all books and the topic of bibliophilia, and all fantasy novels, then you might enjoy the entire trilogy. I recommend reading the first novel. If you can't get enough, then continue. If you found it decent, stop where you are.
