( F ) Books

Inkdeath (Inkheart)

Cornelia Funke

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Indeath Audio 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Absolutely love the Inkheart series by Cornelia Funke, and Inkdeath is the best one yet. I've read them all several times, but this is the first I've listened to in audio. I have to say I really did not care for the reader at all, but listened anyway. I liked the reader of the Potter books and the Tolkein books much better.

Boring and an unsatisfying read 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I had great hopes for this book. When I heard that it had been released I could barely contain my excitement at finally being able to read this book. Now after reading it, I have to say that I was extremely disappointed and dissatisfied.

Inkheart is an amazing story; I loved how it was about the power of the written word and books in general. But in Inkdeath, all of the magic is gone! Meggie Folchart was the protagonist of Inkheart and so the natural assumption is that she is the main character of the whole series. Clearly, she's not or I wouldn't be mentioning it. In Inkspell other characters start to have larger roles, certain things start to revolve around them, and more chapters are told from their perspectives. Yet Meggie is still an integral part of the story. However, in Inkdeath, the heroes are other people, like Mo and Resa. Meggie does absolutely NOTHING!!!! The whole book is 660 pages of boring NOTHING! It was a really boring story and I really disliked how all (& I mean all) of the characters were portrayed. For one, Mo is entirely different. He actually doesn't want to leave the Inkworld and he acts irrationally all of the time. Farid becomes a jerk. Resa is annoying. Maggie is a weak, useless little side character who sits weepy on the sidelines. And other characters become annoying fools too.

Cornelia Funke takes too long to make a point in this story. The ending is predictable - most of the evil is vanquished! Yay! - but the story still doesn't end on a satisfying note. As I said before, it was boring. I can't get over it. I kept waiting for Meggie to do something, for example, write something herself independent of Fenoglio to affect change and save everybody. In the last eighth of the book I finally began to give up hope and it came crashing down on me that this book was disappointing. I mutinously wished that Cornelia had never written a sequel to the wonderful Inkheart, because even though I loved Inkspell, as a cliff-hanger, it was nothing without an awesome final book and Inkdeath was not it.

So, though I fervently recommend Inkheart to any bibliophile, Inkdeath gets 2 stars from me because it lacks anything really interesting. You needn't bother reading it. If you've read Inkheart and Inkspell already, don't go on to Inkdeath so that you can remember those books and those characters with fondness.

Editorial Review:

The Adderhead--his immortality bound in a book by Meggie's father, Mo--has ordered his henchmen to plunder the villages. The peasants' only defense is a band of outlaws led by the Bluejay--Mo's fictitious double, whose identity he has reluctantly adopted. But the Book of Immortality is unraveling, and the Adderhead again fears the White Women of Death. To bring the renegade Bluejay back to repair the book, the Adderhead kidnaps all the children in the kingdom, dooming them to slavery in his silver mines unless Mo surrends. First Dustfinger, now Mo: Can anyone save this cursed story?

Inkheart

Cornelia Funke

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 482 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Meggie’s father, Mo, has an wonderful and sometimes terrible ability. When he reads aloud from books, he brings the characters to life--literally. Mo discovered his power when Maggie was just a baby. He read so lyrically from the the book Inkheart, that several of the book’s wicked characters ended up blinking and cursing on his cottage floor. Then Mo discovered something even worse--when he read Capricorn and his henchmen out of Inkheart, he accidentally read Meggie’s mother in.

Meggie, now a young lady, knows nothing of her father's bizarre and powerful talent, only that Mo still refuses to read to her. Capricorn, a being so evil he would "feed a bird to a cat on purpose, just to watch it being torn apart," has searched for Meggie's father for years, wanting to twist Mo's powerful talent to his own dark means. Finally, Capricorn realizes that the best way to lure Mo to his remote mountain hideaway is to use his beloved, oblivious daughter Meggie as bait!

Cornelia Funke’s imaginative ode to books and book lovers is sure to be enjoyed by fans of her breakout debut, The Thief Lord, and young readers who enjoyed the similarly themed The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley. (Ages 10 to 15) --Jennifer Hubert

Inkspell (Inkheart)

Cornelia Funke

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 221 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Just a few chapters into Inkspell, Mo (a.k.a. "Silvertongue") sagely says to his daughter, "Stories never really end, Meggie, even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page." A fitting meta-observation for this, the unplanned second installment in Cornelia Funke's beloved now-trilogy.

Of course, it's that sort of earnest, almost gushing veneration of books and book-loving that made the absorbing suspense-fantasy Inkheart so wonderful in the first place, with that lit-affection getting woven integrally into the plot (Inkheart being both Funke's first book in the series, and the fictitious book within that book, authored by the frustrated Fenoglio, now trapped within the book, er, within the book. Fenoglio, perhaps not surprisingly, self-referentially wishes in Inkspell that he had written a sequel to Inkheart.) Inkspell should serve as a special treat for fans of the first book, as characters from Inkheart who have found themselves in the "real world" (if there is such a thing) find themselves read back into their own mythic, word-spun world--along with some of our favorite "real-world" characters. As with the previous book, Funke's greatest accomplishment here is telling such a rich and involving (and fun!) story, while still managing sweet, subtle commentary on the nature of words and meaning. Expect a tantalizing finale, too--as Funke says, "No reader will forgive me the ending, though, without a part three." (Ages 8 and up) --Paul Hughes

Corduroy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 101 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Have you ever dreamed of being locked in a department store at night? The endearing story of Corduroy paints a picture of the adventures that might unfold (for a teddy bear at least) in such a situation. When all the shoppers have gone home for the night, Corduroy climbs down from the shelf to look for his missing button. It's a brave new world! He accidentally gets on an elevator that he thinks must be a mountain and sees the furniture section that he thinks must be a palace. He tries to pull a button off the mattress, but he ends up falling off the bed and knocking over a lamp. The night watchman hears the crash, finds Corduroy, and puts him back on the shelf downstairs. The next morning, he finds that it's his lucky day! A little girl buys him with money she saved in her piggy bank and takes him home to her room. Corduroy decides that this must be home and that Lisa must be his friend. Youngsters will never get tired of this toy-comes-alive tale with a happy ending, so you may also want to seek out Dan Freeman's next creation, A Pocket for Corduroy. (Ages 3 to 8)

Time for Bed

Mem Fox

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 139 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Classic Bedtime Story 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I read this book to my daughter many nights from the night she was born until she was old enough for chapter books. She loved the cadence of the rhymes and would repeat them along with me as she got older. Now my oldest step-daughter is having her first baby so this is one of the books we got her - we hope it will be a favorite in her house as well!

A true bedtime story 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is a great book that I would recommend to all for those quite moments just before sleep. This gentle story leads you through an array of animals as they settle down for the night. I find the pictures great and the gentle rhythm of the book a delight. I could not as more of a bedtime story.

Editorial Review:

Darkness is falling everywhere and little ones are getting sleepy, feeling cozy, and being tucked in. It’s time for a wide yawn, a big hug, and a snuggle under the covers--sleep tight! “Working beautifully with the soothingly repetitive text, each painting conveys a warm feeling of safety and affection.”--School Library Journal

The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 552 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time," Milo laments. "[T]here's nothing for me to do, nowhere I'd care to go, and hardly anything worth seeing." This bored, bored young protagonist who can't see the point to anything is knocked out of his glum humdrum by the sudden and curious appearance of a tollbooth in his bedroom. Since Milo has absolutely nothing better to do, he dusts off his toy car, pays the toll, and drives through. What ensues is a journey of mythic proportions, during which Milo encounters countless odd characters who are anything but dull.

Norton Juster received (and continues to receive) enormous praise for this original, witty, and oftentimes hilarious novel, first published in 1961. In an introductory "Appreciation" written by Maurice Sendak for the 35th anniversary edition, he states, "The Phantom Tollbooth leaps, soars, and abounds in right notes all over the place, as any proper masterpiece must." Indeed.

As Milo heads toward Dictionopolis he meets with the Whether Man ("for after all it's more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be"), passes through The Doldrums (populated by Lethargarians), and picks up a watchdog named Tock (who has a giant alarm clock for a body). The brilliant satire and double entendre intensifies in the Word Market, where after a brief scuffle with Officer Short Shrift, Milo and Tock set off toward the Mountains of Ignorance to rescue the twin Princesses, Rhyme and Reason. Anyone with an appreciation for language, irony, or Alice in Wonderland-style adventure will adore this book for years on end. (Ages 8 and up)

Harriet the Spy

Louise Fitzhugh

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 145 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ages 8-12. Thirty-two years before it was made into a movie, Harriet the Spy was a groundbreaking book: its unflinchingly honest portrayal of childhood problems and emotions changed children's literature forever. Happily, it has neither dated nor become obsolete and remains one of the best children's novels ever written. The fascinating story is about an intensely curious and intelligent girl, who literally spies on people and writes about them in her secret notebook, trying to make sense of life's absurdities. When her classmates find her notebook and read her painfully blunt comments about them, Harriet finds herself a lonely outcast. Fitzhugh's writing is astonishingly vivid, real and engaging, and Harriet, by no means a typical, loveable heroine, is one of literature's most unforgettable characters. School Library Journal wrote, "a tour de force... bursts with life." The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books called it "a very, very funny story." And The Chicago Tribune raved, "brilliantly written... a superb portrait of an extraordinary child."

Great Brain,The (Great Brain)

John D. Fitzgerald

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 79 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A great read but BEWARE. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This book is a wonderful protrait of 19th century rural America, but people should be aware that it was written at a time when there was much more freedom of speech than we have today. Topics in the book include suicide, religious intolerance and fear of immigrants. There is a scene where the boys go skinny dipping and also one story concerns John mating his dog, so this book probably should not be brought to a public elementary school for fear it might offend someone. Also there are no African-Americans in the book, and while the book does portray Jews, Moromons, Protestants and Catholics coexisting, there are no Muslims in this book, so it is not very politically correct. Also the "I" word is used casually and no mention is made of the plight of native Americans, except to say that they are the only non-immigrants in America. Women are displayed in subservient roles, always cooking, cleaning and taking care of the sick, although all the boys are portrayed as having chores. [...]

Editorial Review:

The best con man in the Midwest is only ten years old. Tom, a.k.a., the Great Brain, is a silver-tongued genius with a knack for turning a profit. When the Jenkins boys get lost in Skeleton Cave, the Great Brain saves the day. Whether it’s saving the kids at school, or helping out Peg-leg Andy, or Basil, the new kid at school, the Great Brain always manages to come out on top—and line his pockets in the process.

Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge (Public Television Storytime Books)

Mem Fox

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

my all time favorite 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

All I can say is I have had this book for many years and it is one of my FAVORITE children's books. Cutely written and the message is wonderful.

Got Grandparents? 5 out of 5 stars.
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This is a beautiful story. It's perfect for reading to children who have grandparents with major memory loss. The illustrations by Julie Vivas are equally beautiful.

Editorial Review:

The offbeat style of this wonderful story--and of Julie Vivas's perfectly matched illustrations--couldn't be summed up better than by the oddness of the first sentence: "There was once a small boy called Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and what's more he wasn't very old either." Wilfrid lives next to a retirement home, filled with folks like "Mrs. Jordan who played the organ" and "Mr. Hosking who told him scary stories." But his favorite old person is 96-year-old Miss Nancy. Everyone says Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and despite the fact that Wilfrid doesn't even know what a memory is, by accident he helps her find it. Mem Fox's original take on the capacity of children to help the old remember is especially notable for its non-patronizing focus on old people. (Ages 4 to 8) --Richard Farr

The Thief Lord

Cornelia Funke

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 394 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Imagine a Dickens story with a Venetian setting, and you'll have a good sense of Cornelia Funke's prizewinning novel The Thief Lord, first published in Germany in 2000. This suspenseful tale begins in a detective's office in Venice, as the entirely unpleasant Hartliebs request Victor Getz's services to search for two boys, Prosper and Bo, the sons of Esther Hartlieb's recently deceased sister. Twelve-year-old Prosper and 5-year-old Bo ran away when their aunt decided she wanted to adopt Bo, but not his brother. Refusing to split up, they escaped to Venice, a city their mother had always described reverently, in great detail. Right away they hook up with a long-haired runaway named Hornet and various other ruffians who hole up in an abandoned movie theater and worship the elusive Thief Lord, a young boy named Scipio who steals jewels from fancy Venetian homes so his new friends can get the warm clothes they need. Of course, the plot thickens when the owner of the pawn shop asks if the Thief Lord will carry out a special mission for a wealthy client: to steal a broken wooden wing that is the key to completing an age-old, magical merry-go-round. This winning cast of characters--especially the softhearted detective with his two pet turtles--will win the hearts of readers young and old, and the adventures are as labyrinthine and magical as the streets of Venice itself. (Ages 9 and older) --Karin Snelson