My Book Side

I watched the advance screening of this movie early this year and since then, I’ve always wanted to read the book hoping to read more details and get lost in the world of magic.  And in a way, I did.

My initial reaction after reading the book was an eventual comparison with the movie.  The general plot and flow was captured.  Events were very clear and almost exactly like the book, if not for some that were omitted.  It would be interesting to find Tinkerbell on the movie screen or perhaps the tin man.  One difference though is that the movie projected a sense of foreboding that makes you want to look forward to the next part of the story (and that was what made me want to read the book).  The book puts it subtly, with only a slight feeling of deference for Inkspell.

Inkheart is generally, a “book within a book”.  The concept brings about a zillion of pictures in my head, with the most recent, Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel wherein Dream punished someone to eternal dreaming – to dream of suffering or dying, feel the fear, the pain and the anguish, only to wake up and find himself in another dream of the same fate.  Or if you’ve watched “The Eye 3″ wherein a couple found themselves waking up only to find out they never did and are simply walking across the “universe of the dead.”

Now going back (cause if I don’t, I won’t be able to finish this review), the book, “Inkheart” was the source of all Mo’s “misfortunes.”  It was through this book, he found out he has a gift: to “read out” characters into the real world, and so the name “Parseltongue”.  This however, has an effect, when someone goes out of a book, someone in the real world goes in, it was how he lost his wife, in the same instance he found out he has the gift.

The story progresses to years after that happened and to the day that he was sought to read more characters out of other books.  He was being sought by Dustfinger, who wanted to be “read back” into the book (which Mo couldn’t) and also, by Capricorn (one of the characters he read out and who happened to be the villain in the book).  Mo has avoided and promised he wouldn’t read aloud anymore for he feels that it’s wrong to take away someone’s world from them, or in a way, to destroy your own world.  Capricorn, however, knows that human empathy defeats even the strongest of strong – and so uses Mo’s daughter, Meggie, to make him read again.  And he has happened to read out Farid -a character in “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.”  (Someone like Aladdin )

As it turns out, his daughter, Meggie, shared the same gift and the story turns into a reverse.   This time, daughter attempts to save dad.

Capricorn wanted either Mo or Meggie to read “The Shadow” from Inkheart.  The book describes “The Shadow” in a very specific way but I can’t quite remember the actual words, so I’d compare it to an abyss that can change the phase of the earth.  Now the world is at stake.

The book details how Mo and Meggie was able to alter that “end” and the book ends with Dustfinger going his way while Mo and Meggie attempting to move forward.

Cornelia Funke’s writing is direct, simple and very straightforward.  I find this appealing for graders rather than adolescents, though.  For one, Meggie is 12.  Maybe in the succeding books, I’ll see more progress.  I also think that this book is better appreciated by wide-readers who must have read all the other books mentioned or referred to.

When reading a book such as this, one just have to remember, we can choose not to grow up…  Like Peter Pan.