by Cornelia FunkeI finished this book a week or so ago for an online book club I am trying to participate in. It's taken me a while to post about it because I really didn't like it. I should state up front that I'm not a fantasy fan.
This book was too dark, but the premise about reading characters into and out of books was interesting (although it really did not make sense how a person could be read into a book s/he was not originally a character in).
The book was too long; the story dragged and repeated itself (back and forth to the villain's lair) and was hard to finish. I think it may have suffered from being translated from its original German. The real human characters (those not read out of a book) seemed underdeveloped. Some of the things 12-year-old Meggie had to go through were awful and inappropriate for her age. Mo/Silvertongue was very unsympathetic. I thought Elinor evolved the most, from someone wrapped up in her books to someone who cared more for other people.
I think I would have enjoyed this book more if the characters read out of books had positive adventures instead of trying to kill or otherwise hurt each other. I'm not at all interested in reading any of the sequels, nor in seeing the movie.
