Reckless by Cornelia Funke
US Release Date : September 14th, 2010
Publisher : Little Brown
Pages : 400
Series : Book One
Rating : 3/5
"Beyond the mirror, the darkest fairy tales come alive...
For years, Jacob Reckless has enjoyed the Mirrorworld's secrets and treasures.
Not anymore.
His younger brother has followed him.
Now dark magic will turn the boy to beast, break the heart of the girl he loves, and destroy everything Jacob holds most dear....
Unless he can find a way to stop it.
If you're looking for happily ever after, you've come to the wrong place."
I, like many other people, fell in love with Inkheart and went on to read other great books by Cornelia Funke. When I began this book, I thought it would become another book I would love but unfortunately this book let me down quite a bit.
In this book there is a mirror in our world which takes you into another world in which all our fairy tales are real. A young man, Jacob, finds the mirror and begins to hind in this other world when his parents die. One day his brother, Will, follows Jabob into the world and gets scratched by a Goyl. Goyls are at war with the humans. The Goyls were aided by a fairy who cast a spell that said whenever a human was scratched by a Goyl they would slowly turn into a Goyl. Therefore, Will begins to turn into a Goyl. With the help of Clara, Will’s girlfriend, Fox, a girl who can turn into a fox with the help of a magic pelt, and a dwarf Jacob sets out on a quest to keep his brother from changing into a Goyl.
There were a couple things I didn’t like about this book. The first is the changing perspectives. At times it is really hard to tell who is telling the story. Another problem is that I never felt like I got to know Jacob and Will very well. I didn’t care about what they were doing and if they lived or died. I was much more interested in what Fox and Clara were doing.
That being said, there were parts of this book that I did LOVE. The chapter about the tailor was terrifying! I would love a whole story surrounding that character. I also enjoyed the illustrations on the first page of every chapter. I also loved Fox. She was a strong female character who was used to protecting herself and Jacob. She knows how to fight and can’t stand being left behind and out of the loop.
Reckless definitely has its flaws but it’s still worth reading if you enjoy darker retellings of popular fairy tales. I, for one, would only reread it for the chapter on the Tailor and the character of Fox who I loved.
This book was part of my "Off The Shelf" book challenge.
This book was part of my "Off The Shelf" book challenge.
Cornelia is a master at weaving a great story, from start to finish. She draws power from folklore and her favorite stories, but she is also incredibly original. Reckless was just so. While it could have been a terrible retelling of Grimm's fairytales (what it was built on and after), it was a wonderful example of taking from the classics without copying them. Another very good aspect of Reckless is that Cornelia is not afraid to give her characters pain. It is what real stories are made of, and this author definitely knows how to toy with her reader's emotions for the characters by making them endure hardship. This is much of what kept me into the book the whole time. Sacrifice and hardship make books so much more real.
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