In this book Meggie discovers that her father has been keeping a rather interesting secret from her: he can read characters out of books.  The flip side of this secret is that every time he reads someone out of a book, someone from the real world disappears into the book, which is what happened to her mother when Meggie was just a little girl.

Now, the villain that Mo read out of the book all those years ago is after him and his copy of Inkheart to make sure that no one can ever read him back into his own story, as he happens to like our world quite a bit.  Meggie and her father then get caught up in trying to put an end to Capricorn’s reign of terror in a small village in rural Italy before he manages to get Mo to provide him with an even more sinister weapon than his band of henchmen.

This is a rather long novel, and while that seems to be the vogue in children’s fantasy right now, I’m not sure this novel is on the same level as Harry Potter or Twilight.  There are bits that seem to drag a bit, and I didn’t get to that can’t-put-it-down phase of reading until the last sixty pages or so.  That’s not a whole lot of edge of the seat excitement for a novel that tops five hundred pages.

Maybe I just have a bias towards fantasy novels that actually give me an entirely new world to explore, but I just find Meggie’s story a little sad.  Her story proves that when fantasy characters are found in real life, they are more the stuff of horror than enchantment.  In the end, it was just too much reality and not enough fantasy for me…too much dismay and not enough fun or excitement.

On the other hand, one of my sixth grade students just finished reading it before me and absolutely LOVED it, so maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about.  I will also say in the book’s favor that overall it is an interesting read, with some good, thoughtful and thought-provoking writing, as long as you don’t have specific expectations when picking up a novel that is marketed as fantasy.

This book could generate some interesting family discussions about the nature of evil.  Can a real person be completely evil in the way that written characters are sometimes?  What do we do about people that don’t seem to have any redeeming qualities?  On a slightly more advanced level, I’d personally love to discuss the comments Funke inserts into the novel about the nature of fiction and the role(s) that stories play in society.  She has some interesting ideas:

“Perhaps there’s another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does.  And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we’d see peering through a keyhole.  Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there’s a whole world that goes on–developing and changing like our own world.”