Children's Review: Reckless

 

Funke takes readers on a chilling and imaginative adventure enriched by the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Just as 12-year-old Meggie escaped into the Inkworld in Funke's Inkheart, here her protagonist Jacob first enters a Mirrorworld at age 12, via the looking glass in the study of his missing father, John Reckless. Jacob's father had disappeared a year earlier, and when Jacob finds a cryptic note tucked into a book about airplane propulsion, suggesting the mirror is a passageway, he hopes it will lead him to his father. The author suggests a 19th-century European backdrop.

By the second chapter, Jacob is 24, and has been traveling to the Mirrorworld for a dozen years: "Only his love for his brother had made him return to the other world." But now, Jacob's younger brother, Will (a nod to "Wilhelm"), has followed him into the Mirrorworld, and has come under the Dark Fairy's curse: the strike of a Goyl's claw causes Will to show signs of turning into one of them--a man made of stone. As Jacob watches the green stone move up his brother's left forearm, he must try to find an antidote before Will's flesh becomes completely petrified. When Will's girlfriend, Clara, follows him through the mirror, the situation grows even more perilous. The plot thickens when the Dark Witch's dream foretells of a Jade Goyl that could endow her lover, the Goyl king Kami'en, with immortality. Meanwhile, the Goyl wreak such havoc and destruction in Austrey that Therese, the human Empress of Austrey, has agreed to marry her daughter to Kami'en to secure peace.

Funke fills the Mirrorworld with intrigue. As Jacob prepares for his mission, we learn that he's earned a reputation as an expert treasure hunter for the Empress of Austrey, acquiring for her a glass slipper and the golden ball of a princess, among many other prizes. For his quest, he selects from his own treasure chest a handkerchief that produces gold sovereigns, a silver snuffbox, a brass key and a green glass bottle, and he will need them all. He also brings Fox, a woman-vixen shapeshifter whom he'd freed five years earlier and who loves Jacob. The author takes classic Grimm imagery and reinvents it: Jacob first tries to heal Will with berries grown in the garden of a flesh-eating witch (who turns out to be the villain from Hansel and Gretel); they pass through a castle overtaken by thorns (Sleeping Beauty); and a strand of Rapunzel's hair plays a key role in the rescue mission. Jacob must turn to unlikely allies such as a Dwarf who once betrayed him and the Red Witch, sister to the Dark Witch and his one-time lover. For her ambitious storyline, Funke lays out a lot of groundwork here, with a sprawling cast. This first volume comes to a complete resolution but raises plenty of questions to be explored in future installments: Did John Reckless have a relationship with the Goyls at one point? How was he lured into the Mirrorworld, and did he purposely leave a clue for his sons about how to travel there? As the Mirrorworld attracts Jacob to return again and again, so will readers likely be lured back through the looking glass.--Jennifer M. Brown

 

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