Inkheart

Inkheart is a fantasy book about a girl Meggie and here father Mo. Mo is a bookbinder who repairs old books with crumbling spines, broken covers and bindings. Meggie is puzzled by several unanswered questions and weird occurrences, like where her mother is and why they suddenly move without warning, as if her father were trying to escape something. One night a strange man — Dustfinger — arrives at Meggie’s house, speaks with her father, and vanishes.
The next morning, Mo and Meggie leave again suddenly to stay with  Elinor, a tough woman with an obsessive love of books. Dustfinger comes along with them — as well as , a mysterious green book that is, for some reason, very valuable. Meggie finds out just how valuable when her father is kidnapped by the  evil Capricorn — Mo is able to bring book characters out of their books and into the real world.

Meggie,  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!

Funke’s writing (very well translated) has a nice breadth of detail, and she gets across the personalities of the characters quite well .  This is a personality driven book of 500 pgs, is good at evoking mystery and therefore is slower paced.

Cornelia Funke
German author Cornelia Funke rocketed into international bestseller status with the Venetian fantasy book “Thief Lord.” When the English translation, The Thief Lord, was published in the United States by Scholastic in 2002 it immediately entered the New York Times bestseller list and proceeded to climb to the number two.
The Thief Lord has won the Swiss Youth Literature Award, the Zurich Children’s Book Award,the Book Award from the Venice House of Literature, and the Torchlight Children’s Book Award in England.

In America it won the 2002 Book Sense Book of the Year Award and the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the best translated children’s book.

Cornelia’s other novels include the sequel to  Inkheart,  Inkspell, the Ghosthunters series, Igraine the Brave, and Dragon Rider, the number one New York Times bestseller.
The widely anticipated final installment in the Inkheart trilogy, Inkdeath.