Inkspell

Cornelia Funke's Inkspell is a fantasy for 11 year olds about a fire-eater who is finally read back into his own story, and the boy he leaves behind.

What happens

For ten years Dustfinger has been stuck in our world, and he's desperate to go home. So he pays a sweaty, pale-faced man called Orpheus (Farid privately calls him Cheeseface) to write him a way back in. On a lonely roadside at night, Orpheus reads the words aloud. It works. Dustfinger vanishes.

Farid doesn't. Orpheus left him out on purpose.

That opening is heartbreaking. Farid adores Dustfinger and follows him everywhere, and now he's alone on a dark road with a knife at his throat, because an old enemy called Basta has been waiting in the trees. His only hope is to find Meggie and her father.

Meanwhile Dustfinger wakes up in the Inkworld, and you can feel how badly he's missed it. Water-nymphs rise out of a pool to coat his skin so he can steal honey from the fire-elves. Tiny blue fairies want a lock of his hair for their nests. It's gorgeous.

And Meggie? She's at home, filling notebooks with her mother's memories of the Inkworld and falling out with her dad because she can't stop reading them. Any bookworm will recognise that longing to live inside a story. In this book the characters really are pulled back into that world, with rebels and princes battling over it.

It's a big, rich read with lots of characters and threads to hold on to. The chapters begin with a few lines borrowed from other books (Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Pullman), which is a lovely touch for a reader who likes spotting where things come from.

It's worth knowing it can be dark. Basta presses his knife into Farid's skin and swears he'll kill them all, one by one. Meggie's mother remembers cruel years as a servant, including a maid who died of fright. There's a strong swear word too. A confident reader who enjoyed the first book will take it in their stride.

It picks up a year after Inkheart and assumes you know what happened there, so start with that one if you haven't already.

What to read next

If they'd like more Cornelia Funke in the meantime, The Thief Lord opens in Venice with a private detective (very proud of his fake walrus moustache) being hired to find two missing brothers, Prosper and Bo.