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Inkheart

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Manufacturer: Scholastic Paperbacks
List Price: $9.99
Our Price: $5.89
You Save: $ 4.10 ( 41% )
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Average Ratings:

One cruel night, Meggie's father reads aloud from a book called INKHEART-- and an evil ruler 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. Meggie must learn to harness the magic that has conjured this nightmare. For only she can change the course of the story that has changed her life forever. This is INKHEART--a timeless tale about books, about imagination, about life. Dare to read it aloud.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780439709101
ISBN: 0439709105
Label: Scholastic Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Scholastic Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 560
Publication Date: 2005-06-01
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Studio: Scholastic Paperbacks


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Inkspell (Inkheart)
• Inkdeath (Inkheart Trilogy)
• The Thief Lord
• Dragon Rider
• The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book 5)


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: Inkheart Stole My Heart
Comment: My daughter saw this book at Sam's club and insisted that I buy it and its sequel because she had heard about it at school. Since my daughter is dyslexic, I was absolutely ecstatic that she wanted me to buy a book for her to read. Once home and ready to read the book, I realized after only a page that I would have to read it to her, and so I read it to her and my son every night for our bedtime reading. We all absolutely loved this book. I've always fantasized about characters coming out of books, and so even though this is not an original idea, the way that Funke orchestrates it, through her characters, it is fresh and original.

Dustfinger is probably one of my favorite characters, although he was kinda creeping me out (as my 8th graders say) at the beginning of the book. However, he is a rather interesting anti-hero. Capricorn, the evil guy, has a heart so black it is like the black ink the writer used to write the book. Usually, I like the villain of a book to have at least one redeeming quality, but in this book, it seems to fit. Maybe because all the other main characters are quite complex.

I love the fact that a girl, Meggie, is the protagonist of a fantasy book. Many authors have followed the Harry Potter type male protagonist, that it's refreshing to see a girl as a protagonist in a fantasy. Also, Meggie is not only a character that appeals to girls, but boys as well. She doesn't have that "girly" type quality to her that turns boys off. Maybe because she's been raised by her father. Nice characterization on the part of Funke.

Funke is an incredible writer. I love her use of metaphors, imagery, subtle humor mixed with tender emotion. She definitely commands the language, even though her books have been translated. I wish I could read German, just so I could read her books in their original language. I can't imagine them being any better.

My kids really enjoyed the excerpts from the various fairy tale classics at the beginning of each chapter, too.

This book is definitely worth having in your home library to read again and again. By the way, we haven't seen the movie yet. Although we intend to soon.

Customer Rating:
Summary: AMAZING!
Comment: Inkheart is a breath taking adventure into a land of wonder. I believe that Cornelia Funke did a great job and is worth all praise! Very interesting, I could not keep my head out of it! It is descriptive, yet not overly to the point of boredom. It gives a mental picture, and you feel as if you are stepping into the book as the characters come alive!

Customer Rating:
Summary: The beginning of a great friendship!!
Comment: I loved reading each book in this trilogy. Each book is better then the one that came before....Cornelia Funke's style of writing entwines you in the story...I have not enjoyed reading a searies so avidly since Harry Potter. I could not put any of the three books in the trilogy down. And though I read all three for the first time in the last month. It was so much fun to begin with, I feel like I could sit down and re-read them all over again, right now. Though the last book, Inkdeath, ended only with me wanting to know more..read more...and never stop reading the words of Cornelia Funke...she is definitely a magician with words.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Unique bit of fantasy
Comment: I saw the ads for the Inkheart DVD and decided to read the book first because, as everyone knows, the book is almost always better than the movie.

Anyway, the book in built upon a fairly unique premise - the people and characters from a fantasy novel come to life. I say fairly unique because both Dean Koontz and Stephen King explored this idea 20 years ago and several movies have jumped on this same idea in the last year.

I do not give the book 5 stars. The book is a dark piece of fiction - relentlessly so. The mood is nearly always somber and I found the book compelling but often depressing.

The plot is fairly simple and the bad men in the book do a lot more threatening than real evil, but they do evil things - mutilations, burning people out of their homes, kidnappings, blackmail, and so on. I have no problem with books that depict that evil exists in the world. As C.S. Lewis noted:

"Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can't bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the...atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker."

Please pay close attention to the age guidelines noted in the publishers notes at the top of the page for this one.


Customer Rating:
Summary: Nothing Fantastic
Comment: There is nothing fantastic about this book, and I mean that literally. I was expecting characters being read in and out of books with plenty of fun and excitement. Instead, we get very simple plot stretched so thin you can barely stand to finish it. Our main character Maggie finds a mysterious stranger outside her and her father's home one night. It turns out the stranger is a friend of her father who has come to ask him to give up a dangerous item he is holding. The item turns out to be a book. An evil villan wants the book for some purpose which I'm still not sure about. He doesn't want to go back to the story he came from, he only wants riches temporarily, and in the end he just wants another evil character to come out of the book, I think. The villan's motivations make little sense, and his character is just as flat as all of the others in this story. The villan captures Maggie, Maggie's aunt, and Mo a few times, a few events happen which I won't mention for sake of spoiling what little plot there is, and then it is over and you felt like you wasted way too much of your time.

I wanted to stop reading around page 300. I realized no one would be traveling into or out of books, the characters had already been captured, escaped, and been recaptured, and I didn't much care what happened. I assumed the main characters would find a way to read people back into books and the evil villan would be vanquished. This book is entirely too linear and simplistic. There isn't much fantasy to it, and it falls short of my expectations. I fail to see how a plot with so much potential ended up so dry and agonizingly boring.

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