Over two decades ago, Cornelia Funke started a story about magical words, featuring a bookbinder who had the ability to bring stories to life by reading them aloud, but at a cost. While reading a book called Inkheart to his wife, Mo Folchart unleashed the book’s villain and a couple other characters, but his wife vanished into the book. Over the course of three books, Funke immersed us in this story about Mo and his daughter, of storybook characters brought into our world, and even the writer of the book, Fenoglio. Eventually we even made our way into the world of the book, where new adventures awaited—as well as new villains to face.
My wife and I read all three books—Inkheart, Inkspell, and Inkdeath—when they first came out and revisited them when our own kids were old enough, but it has been a long time. (Inkdeath was first published in 2007.) So I was surprised when I found out that there was a fourth book in the series, Inkworld: The Color of Revenge, published in November last year. I decided it was time for a re-read of the originals before I dove into the new book.
Since it’s hard to say a whole lot about the latest book without spoilers for the rest of the trilogy, I’ll start with some general, non-spoilery things for those of you who haven’t already read those and then you can skip the rest. These are definitely stories for people who love books: one of the main characters is a bookbinder, and Meggie’s great-aunt Elinor is a book lover who has an enormous library and (at least at first) seems to care more for books than people.
The author of Inkheart (the book inside the book, that is) shows up as a character, and Funke definitely has a lot of fun with Fenoglio, too. He’s so proud of the characters he’s created, and at first he doesn’t take the book’s villain seriously because he’s just so delighted with what a good job he did making an interesting evil character. Throughout the series, Fenoglio also struggles with some of the things that most writers experience, but often in a more literal way: losing control of his characters and his world, the inability to think of what to write, forgetting pieces of his story.
In the second and third books, things get even more magical when the characters move from “our” world into the world of the book, raising all sorts of new questions. How will the story play out, now that the cast of characters has changed? Do Fenoglio’s words still have power when he himself has been transported into his story? Fenoglio is frequently frustrated by things that he didn’t write—characters he didn’t make up, situations that he had not foreseen. The story has a life of its own, and it’s not entirely clear who’s writing it. (The answer, of course, is that Funke loves to torture her favorite characters as much as Fenoglio did.) The world of the story is one of princes and castles, fairies and glass men, traveling performers and robbers—and there is certainly a lot of intrigue. Mo, Meggie, and the rest of the “real” people get tangled up in the story.
Okay, now for the spoilers, so if you haven’t read the series yet and want to preserve the surprises, stop here!
One of the major characters in the second book is Orpheus, a young man in the real world who also has the ability to read things out of books. He makes a deal to read Dustfinger back into Inkheart, his favorite book as a kid, but then eventually reads some of the surviving villains back into the book along with Mo—who winds up in mortal peril. Meggie is able to get herself into the story to find her parents, and later brings Orpheus himself into the story because they need his help—but instead of using his mastery of words to help them, he instead makes himself wealthy and starts looking for ways to get even more power.
All of that comes to a head in the third book, where there are several figures all vying for power, and Orpheus is in the middle of it, trying to control things in his favor. By the end of the book, most of the villains are finally defeated and Orpheus flees to the north, and you get a sort of “happily ever after” ending—and that’s what I thought for all this time. Of course, that one loose end was never tied up, and that’s where Inkworld: The Color of Revenge picks up.
Five years after the events of Inkdeath, Orpheus is still angry and resentful, all the more so because he has lost his ability to write and read whatever he wants into existence in this world. Dustfinger, once his childhood hero, is now his sworn enemy, and Orpheus vows revenge. Without the use of his once-magical voice, Orpheus turns to other sources of power, seeking out a Shadow Reader who can create magical spells for him to use against his enemies. One of the interesting things about this book is that the world of Inkheart has always seemed like a magical place (both to me as a reader and to the characters who come from the “real” world)—but within that world, most of the characters have a mistrust of magic. Dustfinger’s ability to talk to fire isn’t magic—it’s a process that, I suppose, counts as science in that world. So the introduction of characters who do what’s considered magic in this world is a novelty, and changes the rules again of what is and isn’t possible.
Inkworld is a significantly shorter book than the first three: they clock in at over 1,500 pages, and Inkworld is a slim 300 pages. Even a lot of the chapters in the book are shorter, some only a page or two. But one of the biggest cuts is that a lot of the characters from the earlier books (and there were a lot to keep track of!) are sidelined for a lot of this story, magically trapped and out of commission. Dustfinger and his best friend the Black Prince (both of whom are finally given first names) face off against Orpheus, and we don’t end up jumping around to check in on so many different threads of the story as before. Orpheus does have a couple new associates—in particular, the failed troubador Baldassare Rinaldi, one of this book’s new villains. He does Orpheus’ dirty work for him with pleasure, and is especially despicable.
I really enjoyed my trip back into the Inkworld—there were a lot of details about the stories that I had forgotten, so I’m glad I re-read the whole thing. (Inkworld does have a short introduction that fills you in, just in case you want to get right to the new stuff.) It feels like it finally wraps everything up so that all of the original characters can finally have their happily ever after without the shadow of Orpheus (or any of the other villains) hanging over them. And the story also brings in a few new heroes; it feels a little bit like the changing of the guard, like Fenoglio’s old story is finally giving way to make room for these new characters that he hadn’t invented himself, going to locations that he didn’t make up. Whether we will get to find out where the story goes from here is still a mystery.
My Current Stack
Aside from the Inkworld series, I’ve also just finished Young Hag and the Witches’ Quest by Isabel Greenberg, a graphic novel retelling of Arthurian legends, mostly from the perspective of Morgan le Fay. More on that soon, along with another book by Greenberg, Glass Town, which is about the imaginary realm created by the Brontës when they were children. I’ve also been doing a re-read of Bad Machinery by John Allison. I had the first 5 collected volumes and really enjoyed them years ago, and came across them in my daughter’s room recently and decided to give them a re-read. Still a blast, and makes me want to go catch up on whatever happened after these stories.
On the non-fiction front, I’m still making my way through Against Platforms by Mike Pepi but although it’s a slim volume it’s slow reading for me. I also started reading When We Walk By by Kevin Adler and Donald Burnes, a book about homelessness in America, and it has already shown me some of the ways that I’ve fallen into stereotypes and assumptions.
Disclosure: I received a review copy of Inkworld for this review; affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent bookstores!
