Inkheart

I was a junior in college when my mother called me and told me she wanted me to watch the first Harry Potter film with her over Thanksgiving break. I laughed and told her that I could not as I had not read the book. "English majors' rule," I said. The next day I found myself begrudgingly buying the book in a local shop. The rest, as they say, is history. I fell in love with Harry Potter and went so far as to write almost forty pages on the series in my master's thesis. The "English majors' rule" has become somewhat of a joke. I know a lot of English majors who appreciate film as much as books, and almost all of them realize that it's a completely separate medium that needs to be viewed differently than the printed word. Still, when my mother asked me recently to see Inkheart with her, I made a mental note to buy the book. I bought it on Thursday evening, and I finished it just now.

It's no Harry Potter, but it was entertaining. The basic premise (as I'm sure we all know by now from movie trailers) is that Mo can read characters out of books. Nine years before the story takes place, he read Capricorn and Basta out of Inkheart, a fantasy novel by a man named Fenoglio. Capricorn and Basta have set up their evil villian camp in our world and have been trying to catch Mo to have him read more villians out of the book. They like money and inspiring fear in the people around them, especially fear that results in their gain. However, the book felt like cops and robbers while I was reading it. When a story is 534 pages long, I should not be able to summarize ALL the major action in two basic compound sentences, but I can. Capricorn and his men capture Mo, Meggie, Dustfinger, and Elinor, but Dustfinger helps them all escape. Capricorn and his men recapture Meggie and Fenoglio (the author), and they make Meggie read a monster out of a book. It dragged a little at times. The second time we were caught by Capricorn's men, I couldn't help but wonder what we needed the previous capture for...plotwise that is.

I am also complaining because I like my fantasy to take me to another world, and this one did not. Several supernatural things happened, but they all happened here in our own world. Speaking of setting, the setting was weird. The book apparently takes place in Italy, but there is no nod to the language at all. It seems as if everyone in Italy is just running around speaking English. I found it a little disconcerting. I thought it was otherwise well written, and I like the characters (Mo and Meggie, especially, but Elinor also), so I have picked up Inkspell in our school library, and it seems as though we might get another world after all, from the maps at the opening at least.

I think my mom will enjoy the movie though, if that counts for anything! :)