Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke

I loved Inkheart and Inkspell. Meggie and Farid, Mo and Resa - funnily enough, it is the everyday characters from our world that speak to me the most, despite their being surrounded by the fantastical creatures of the Inkworld. (Okay, okay, so Farid is technically from A Thousand and One Nights, or something, whatever.) This world is breathtaking - Funke is truly a master artist. The world she paints is vivid and shocking, at once beguilingly innocent and treacherously evil. Meggie is just a beautiful character - of course, we see a lot of her point of view; she's just the age of the target audience for this book. And it's really a story about how she grows up in the completely frightening world inside a book. Her father, Mo/Silvertongue/Blujay, has the power of reading aloud and making characters from books appear in our world. And of making things from our world disappear into books - which is what happens numerous times to various characters during this series.

But back to Meggie. I could listen to her thoughts all day. She's strong and brave (quality character traits for a young girl, and she wears them well). She's fiercely loyal and loving. People seem to act differently around her. She's special - I can't seem to put it any other way.

Yes, terrible things happen. Though Meggie is in love with Farid, his feelings are unknown. He clearly likes Meggie a good deal; but then, he doesn't seem to mind kissing the maids terribly much. His motives are beyond my ken. (I love that expression.) I hope to find a happily-ever-after for Meggie and Farid, Mo and Resa, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. The Inkworld is fraught with peril and bloodshed, and I'm a little nervous that not everyone will make it out alive.

Update: Yes, there is a happily-ever-after (of sorts). The resolution with Farid made me sad, but he should have seen it coming. It was really his decisions that led to the outcome.

Funnily enough, though, I can't really see this story as a happily-ever-after that way. I wonder if the author has some more Inkworld tales up her sleeve, perhaps to do with Meggie's little brother...I'd read them.

The Gemma Doyle Trilogy

I recently finished books two and three of the Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray. I really, really enjoyed book one (A Great and Terrible Beauty), and was so pleased that book two (Rebel Angels) continued to shine. However, I was so disappointed with the ending of the story (as told in The Sweet Far Thing), that it fairly ruined the series for me.

Okay, so I always had some serious misgivings about certain aspects of the stories. Such as how Gemma and her friends seem extremely cavalier about how they use the magic, both within the Realms and in our own world. Also, Gemma and her friends are shockingly unsupervised for young ladies of breeding in Victorian England. Don't even get me started about the implausibility of some of the things they do.

Here's my major problem, though: I'm just a sucker for a good coming-of-age love story, and this one had a doozy. Gemma and Kartik are lovely characters, and their developing romance is sweet and real. The fact that any relationship between them is impossible in the society in which they live - Indians at that time being considered by the English as lowly, inferior beings fit only for service - makes it forbidden and dangerous. But, as with so much in the Realms, anything seems possible. SPOILER ALERT! I so dearly wanted them to end up together. The climax of the book, when they go to the Winterlands to destroy the Tree of All Souls, made me feel cheated and betrayed by the author. Seriously - I don't know how she can consider that an acceptable ending. It doesn't even make sense.

In short, I can't recommend this book. I wanted so very much to like it, but in the end, I was disappointed by the completely bizarre ending.