The Yellow Bookcase

Imagine it were possible to bring the characters from a book to life. Not like when someone reads a book with such enchantment that the characters seem to jump off the pages and into your bedroom... but for real. Imagine they could actually climb out of the pages and into our world.

Then, imagine if those characters brought their world into ours.

One cruel night, Meggie's father, Mo, reads aloud from Inkheart and an evil ruler named Capricorn escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books.

Somehow, Meggie and Mo must learn to harness the magic that conjured this nightmare. Somehow, they must change the course of the story that has changed their lives forever.

This is Inkheart, a timeless about books, about imagination, about life.

Dare to read it aloud.

Righty-o. I'd like to point something out - Mo read Capricorn (and Basta and Dustfinger) out of the book about nine or so years before our story actually begins. The night that Dustfinger comes to their home to warn Mo is when Meggie "is smack in the middle of ...adventure"

It's pretty good. No violence, rated PG for Thematic Elements and Some Frightening Images. (This from the Salali rating system.)

The best books never end...

Although a year has passed, not a day goes by without Meggie thinking of Inkheart, the book whose characters came to life -- and changed her life forever.

But for Dustfinger, the fire-eater brought into being from words, the need to return to the original tale has become desperate. When he finds a crooked storyteller with the magical ability to read him back, Dustfinger leaves behind his young apprentice Farid and plunges into the medieval inkscape once more.

Distraught, Farid goes in search of Meggie, and before long both are caught inside the books, too. There they meed Inkheart's author, Fenoglio now living within his own story. But the tale is much changed, and threatening to evolve in ways none of them could ever have imagined. Will Meggie, Farid, and Fenolio manage to write the wrongs of a charmed world? Or is their story on the brink of a very bad ending?

Funny little pun there with "write". And yes, it was italicized in the book. It's not that I have a punny sense of humour. Punny! Ha ha ha ha... *dwindles off*.

Ahem. Anyway, more violence in this one. Fear, pain, death, a gun, and a crazy old fat man are all part of its splendor. Meggie falls in love, Mo is in mortal peril for about half of the book, and Resa regains her voice. Dustfinger meets his faries, and a giant black bear EATS EVERYBODY!!! No, just kidding. But there is a bear in this one. The bear rocks.

Ever since the extraordinary events of Inkspell, when the enchanted book Inkheart drew Meggie and her father, Mo, into its chapters, life in the Inkworld has been more tragic than magical.

The fire-eater Dustfinger is dead, having sacrificed his lie for his apprentice Farid's, and now, under the rule of the evil Adderhead, the fairy-tale land is in bloody chaos, its characters far beyond the control of Fenoglio, their author. Even Elinor, left behind in the real world, believs her family is to be lost--lost between the covers of a book.

Facing the threat of eternal winter, Mo inks a dangerous deal with Death itself. There yet remains a faint hope of changing the cursed story--if only he can fill its pages fast enough.

This is by far the best book in the series. It's thicker than the other two, but it really is amazing. I just don't know how to describe it. Anyway, a new character called Doria appears - and quickly replaces Farid as The-Most-Awesome-Teenage-Guy-In-The-Series. It's not even close.

Death has to be the other Best Character, for me. The scene where Mo discusses his deal with her was extremely well written, in my amateur point of view.

All the characters that were previously just background characters - like some of the Motley Folk, Her Ugliness, and Brianna - suddenly become essential for the story plot, and it really has you guessing how it's going to end, right until the very last page.

www.corneliafunke.de/en You have to put the "en" at the end of the url, or else you'll be looking at a front page that says "Die Welt der Cornelia Funke" as opposed to "The World of Cornelia Funke". Sweet! I now know six-ish words in German! Die, Welt, der, Tinten, tod, and blut! (The, world, of, ink, heart, death (I think)

www.inkheartmovie.com This is the movie site. Obviously. So far, all they have up is a weird background and the trailer, but that may change soon.

inkweb.artemis-fowl.net - This is a fansite that I found on Wikipedia. It looks like it's a branch off of www.artemis-fowl.com, an AF site that I visit. It isn't very complete right now, but I hope that will change.