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Funke is on a serious roll Sep 26, 2008 (72 of 85 found this helpful)
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.
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Sad to see it end this way--spoilers Jan 2, 2009 (39 of 45 found this helpful)
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, revivi
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Good book over all, not as good as the first two Oct 19, 2008 (20 of 23 found this helpful)
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.
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Depressing Disappointment Apr 3, 2009 (8 of 9 found this helpful)
We found this book to be a huge disappointment. I have read the first 2 books in the trilogy(Inkspell and Inkheart) out-loud to my 8 and 10 year old daughters at night before bed. We all enjoyed the first two very much. We started reading Inkdeath. The story is slow, depressing, and more suited for adults than for children. We read over half of the book and my daughters asked if we could stop reading it and pick a different book, which we have done. I'm sorry that Inkdeath did not make us care enough about the characters to plod through the sad, dark story.
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Boring and an unsatisfying read Nov 15, 2008 (38 of 51 found this helpful)
I had great hopes for this book. When I heard that it had been released I could barely contain my excitement at finally being able to read this book. Now after reading it, I have to say that I was extremely disappointed and dissatisfied.
Inkheart is an amazing story; I loved how it was about the power of the written word and books in general. But in Inkdeath, all of the magic is gone! Meggie Folchart was the protagonist of Inkheart and so the natural assumption is that she is the main character of the whole series. Clearly, she's not or I wouldn't be mentioning it. In Inkspell other characters start to have larger roles, certain things start to revolve around them, and more chapters are told from their perspectives. Yet Meggie is still an integral part of the story. However, in Inkdeath, the heroes are other people, like Mo and Resa. Meggie does absolutely NOTHING!!!! The whole book is 660 pages of boring NOTHING! It was a really boring story and I really disliked how all (& I mean all) of the characters were portrayed. For one, Mo is entirely different. He actually doesn't want to leave the Inkworld and he acts irrationally all of the time. Farid becomes a jerk. Resa is annoying. Maggie is a weak, useless little side character who sits weepy on the sidelines. And other characters become annoying fools too.
Cornelia Funke takes too long to make a point in this story. The ending is predictable - most of the evil is vanquished! Yay! - but the story still doesn't end on a satisfying note. As I said before, it was boring. I can't get over it. I kept waiting for Meggie to do something, for example, write something herself independent of Fenoglio to affect change and save everybody. In the last eighth of the book I finally began to give up hope and it came crashing down on me that this book was disappointing. I mutinously wished that Cornelia had never written a sequel to the wonderful Inkheart, because even though I loved Inkspell, as a cliff-hanger, it was nothing without an awesome final book and Inkdeath was not it.
So, though I fervently recommend Inkheart to any bibliophile, Inkdeath gets 2 stars from me because it lacks anything really interesting. You needn't bother reading it. If you've read Inkheart and Inkspell already, don't go on to Inkdeath so that you can remember those books and those characters with fondness.