Reckless by Cornelia Funke

Hardcover, 345 pages

Published September 6th 2010 by Chicken House

ISBN

1905294859 (ISBN13: 9781905294855)

edition language

English

url

http://www.recklessthebook.com/

series

Reckless #1

literary awards

YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults (2011)

 

  For years, Jacob Reckless has been secretly disappearing to another world, a world behind a mirror, a world for which his father abandoned his family. The mirror world is Jacob's escape from reality. It's a place for treasure hunts and magnificent quests. A world where witches haunt the forests and giants and dwarfs roam. A world locked in a deadly war.

Jacob's secret seems safe, until one day his younger brother Will follows him, with disastrous consequence. Faced with a curse that is quickly turning Will to stone, the Reckless brothers are thrust into a race against time to find a cure before Will is lost forever.

Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, master storyteller Cornelia Funke introduces a lush, enchanting world where fantasy meets reality. Reckless is a thrilling adventure, a tale of heroism and loyalty, filled with danger, mystery, and magic--with fairy tales and legends re-imagined as never before

My Review
I wasn't really sure what to make about this book. A part of me liked it and a part of me hated it. It was one of those hit and miss books. For me it just seemed to really drag on in places, almost as if the book was trying to make the story last a lot longer than it needed to. There were suggestions and hints in the book that just didn't seem to fit the story and were soon forgotten but left the reader with this sense of confusion and mysteru still. And yet the story was original and yet unique. It was a story about all fantasy creatures that we are told about as small children, it was a story of adventure and imagination, a story that you will not have read before. However, Cornelia Funke will always be an amazing writer.

The book takes jumps and leaps that perhaps other fantasy books wouldnt, it takes risks and chances just to add something a little more to its pages to give it depth and creativity. I liked the whole tough guy act and yet I got the feeling that there was more than what appeared on the surface. I also liked the whole sense of drama and problems because it wasnt anything that I had heard of before. I have read about others being taken over, but not by a stone that changes your whole outter appearance. The novel flowed, despite the fact that it felt slow in a lot of places, it was intriguing and I did want to read it to the end.

However the end annoyed me... He has one year left to live and they want to leave it like that? You have to tell me that another one is coming out, that this has to be a series, because I just get the feeling that too many webs were built up in that novel to not be expanded on.

My rating