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Summary
Summary
Ever since Jacob Reckless was a child, he has been escaping to a hidden world through a portal in his father's abandoned study. Over the years, he has made a name for himself as a finder of enchanted items and buried secrets. He's also made many enemies and allies--most important, Fox, a beautiful shape-shifting vixen whom Jacob cares for more than he lets on.
But life in this other world is about to change. Tragedy strikes when Jacob's younger brother, Will, follows him through the portal. Brutally attacked, Will is infected with a curse that is quickly transforming him into a Goyl--a ruthless killing machine, with skin made of stone.
Jacob is prepared to fight to save his brother, but in a land built on trickery and lies, Jacob will need all the wit, courage, and reckless spirit he can summon to reverse the dark spell--before it's too late.
Author Notes
Author Cornelia Maria Funke was born in Dorsten, Germany on December 10, 1958. After graduating from the University of Hamburg, she worked as a social worker for three years. After completing a course in book illustration at the Hamburg State College of Design, she worked as a children's book illustrator and designed board games.
Her desire to draw magical worlds and her disappointment over the way some stories were written inspired her to write her own children's books. Her book, The Thief Lord, won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the best translated children's book of the year and the Book Sense Book of the Year Award. She has also received the Book Sense Children's Literature Award for Inkheart and Inkspell.
Funke has written numerous books including Dragon Rider, When Santa Fell to Earth, Igraine The Brave, Reckless, Saving Mississippi, Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath, Igraine the Brave, and The Princess Knight. Inkheart was adapted into a film. Cornelia Funke was voted into the Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of 2005.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, Funke twists fairy lore into a dark incarnation. A prologue introduces Jacob Reckless, 12, heartsick over his father's disappearance. The story then jumps ahead 12 years; Jacob, having figured out how to follow his father through a mirror, has made a name as a finder of magical items-seven-league boots, locks of "Rapunzel-hair"-in war-torn Mirrorworld, ruled by fairies and "Goyl," humans whose skin has turned to stone. Jacob's brother, Will, however, is mauled by a Goyl, and his skin begins to turn to jade; the plot is a race for a cure. The rich re-imagining of familiar fairy tale details is the best part, as there is little character development. There are few child characters, and veiled sexual innuendo and violence make this edgier fare. The writing is beautiful on one page, clunky on another ("But there always comes a time when a man wants to sense the same mortality that dwells in his flesh also in the skin he caresses"). Planned sequels will give Funke a chance to fill in the missing back-story that makes this a frustrating read. Ages 10-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
When Jacob Reckless was twelve he discovered the Mirrorworld, where reality resembles the darkest of fairy tales. Now twenty-four, Jacob must save his brother, Will, when he stumbles into the world and the Dark Fairy begins turning him to stone. This overly dense but rewarding read will appeal to twisted-fairy-tale and fantasy fans. (c) Copyright 2011. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Jacob, whose father has been missing for more than a year, is 12 when he discovers how to use the mirror in his dad's study as a portal to an alternate reality. Chapter 2 picks up the story 12 years later, when his younger brother Will follows him into the mirror's world, where Jacob has carved out an adventurous life for himself and Fox, his companion. Will's experience is different: he begins a slow, painful, relentless transformation into a goyl, a living stone man, though his girlfriend, Clara, works with Jacob and Fox to save him. The alternate world is a largely recognizable, European-fairy-tale land, while the goyls add a new element and are used creatively in ways that serve the story well. It's hard to connect with the main characters, though, perhaps because they are unwilling or unable to communicate well with each other or simply because the author withholds information. Jacob is so enigmatic that some may find him unsympathetic. Story is king here, however, and this adventure-driven fantasy, the first in a series, will have readers turning pages.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN I was 10, I found an ancient collection of Grimm fairy tales in the basement. I cracked the dusty black cover, not expecting much (I knew Cinderella and Snow White and their stupid hair and trilling voices from movies I'd outgrown) and was transfixed. These stories were sick, serious and bloody. Cinderella's sisters did what to their feet? I sat on that cold basement floor and read the entire thick volume (a 1920 version, with sinuous Art Deco illustrations by Elenore Abbott). I felt both thrilled and duped - why had no one told me that fairy tales were creepily delicious? The appeal wasn't just the gross-out factor, of course; it's that fairy tales are about transformation. Someone powerless becomes a hero; boundaries are crossed and identities are altered. There's magic and trickery and cunning. Often the protagonist gets help from unexpected, seemingly humble, places. The bad guys are really bad - rich and greedy, generally murderous, perpetually trying to hog all the magic. Stripped of layers of Hollywood cuteness, these are elemental tales of danger and justice. In recent years there's been a boomlet in middle-grade and young adult novels based on the Grimm Brothers' tales: Michael Buckley's "Sisters Grimm" series; Malinda Lo's "Ash" (a lesbian retelling of "Cinderella"); Jackson Pearce's "Sisters Red" (a werewolf-hunting revamp of "Little Red Riding Hood") and many more. I suspect this is a reaction to how constrained many children's lives have become. Stuck in manicured suburbs and cooped up after school in cities, today's middle-class kids are marched from one résumé-building activity to another, hermetically sealed in peanut-free bubbles. Fairy tales, with their mystery and violence and free-range, underparented children, may seem particularly enticing to today's tweens and teenagers. Which doesn't mean all retellings will appeal to all young readers, of course. "Reckless," by Cornelia Funke, may please fans of traditional fantasy novels but doesn't seem likely to slip the surly bonds of genre. In self-consciously poetic prose it tells the story of Jacob Reckless, a rather unlikable young man who ditches his real-world family (as his father did before him) for adventures in the Mirrorworld. When Jacob's younger brother, Will, follows him through the mirror, bad things happen. Will is cursed by a Dark Fairy and begins metamorphosing into a Goyl, a warlike stone creature. Jacob has to stop being so darn self-absorbed and save Will, with the help of Will's girlfriend, Clara, and Jacob's traveling companion, Fox, who is a fox, except when she isn't. Funke's descriptions of the veins of stone creeping across Will's face and body are nifty, as are the snippets of fairy tale imagery. (Jacob brushes past Sleeping Beauty, unkissed and undiscovered, lying in a dusty, rosebush-choked castle, her gown yellowing and her skin becoming thin as parchment.) But reading "Reckless" is like hacking through thorns. We're plunked into a teeming fairy tale world with too many undifferentiated characters coming at us. The writing is often stilted ("Smoke from countless coal furnaces blackened the windows and the walls, and the cold autumn air certainly did not smell of damp leaves, even though the Dwarfs' sewer system was vastly superior to that of the Empress" - wait, what?). Funke is also fond of sentence fragments. ("Girl. Woman. So much more vulnerable. Strong and yet weak. A heart that knew no armor." Sounds like. William Shatner. As. Captain Kirk.) But the story picks up steam, and I found myself hoping that the inevitable sequel would focus on the intriguing Fox. (Be forewarned: the publisher says the book is for "10 and up" readers, but I'd call it Y.A. Seduction is used as a bargaining chip, and there's a character called the Tailor who is about as terrifying as anything in the "Saw" movies.) Way less grim is "The Grimm Legacy" by Polly Shulman, a fizzy confection that takes the story of Cinderella as its starting point. Put-upon Elizabeth is a mensch (we know this because she gives her gym shoes to a homeless woman on Page 1). Her mom has died, and her dad has remarried a shallow narcissist. What with the cost of her stepsisters' college tuition and all, Elizabeth has to give up her expensive school and is either bullied or ignored in her new one. But noting that Elizabeth is "hardworking and warmhearted, with an independent mind," her teacher gets her a job as a page at the New-York Circulating Material Repository. The repository is a sort of library dating from the 18th century, now housed in a brownstone near Central Park that's mysteriously bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, with glorious Tiffany windows that . . . well, surely the images in the windows aren't moving? The collection contains a variety of magical objects from the Grimms' tales - seven-league boots, spindles, straw, a golden egg, a spiteful mirror. (And, entertainingly, everything has a Dewey decimal number.) But someone is stealing the magic, and Elizabeth and the other pages must figure out what's going on - despite the fact that they don't know which adults they can trust. The story buzzes along at a delightful clip, and though the narrative falls apart a bit toward the end, it's a fun ride. "A Tale Dark & Grimm," by Adam Gidwitz, is something else entirely. In fact, it's unlike any children's book I've ever read. If "Reckless" is an old-school fairy tale fantasy, and "The Grimm Legacy" is a modern one, "A Tale Dark & Grimm" is a completely postmodern creation. It plunks Hansel and Gretel into a succession of other, lesser-known Grimm tales - "Faithful Johannes," "The Three Golden Hairs," "Brother and Sister" and more - but creates a narrative through-line that wends through all the tales like a trail of bread crumbs. Parents do horrible things; they fail their children, and they kill them. But Hansel and Gretel become true heroes - they go on a quest; they save others; they come home; they learn to understand their parents' burdens and failings. Heavy. And yet "A Tale Dark & Grimm" is really, really funny. The first line is "Once upon a time, fairy tales were awesome." THE tone ricochets between lyrical and goofy. There's an intrusive, Snicket-y narrator who warns the reader every time gore is imminent, apologizing, urging the reader to hustle the little kids out of the room. And it all works. As the story progresses, it gets less and less faithful to the source material and becomes its own increasingly rich and strange thing. A Child's Garden of Metafiction! It reminds me of Eudora Welty's "Robber Bridegroom," in which bits of fairy tales, myths, legends and Southern folklore are stitched together into a marvelous new . . . something. My 8-year-old daughter, a tough critic who doesn't like scary books, read "A Tale Dark & Grimm" three times, back to back. She was enchanted, not terrified. And no wonder. "A Tale Dark & Grimm" holds up to multiple rereadings, like the classic I think it will turn out to be. In 'A Tale Dark & Grimm,' the narrator urges us to hustle the little kids out of the room. Marjorie Ingall is a columnist for Tablet magazine.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 7-10-Ever since his father's disappearance when he was a child, Jacob Reckless has used the mirror in the study to travel to a fairy tale world as an escape and in the vain hope of finding his father. Now an adult, Jacob has been careful to keep his travels to the Mirrorworld a secret for years, but his brother Will follows him on one trip, with potentially fatal consequences. Caught up in a war between the humans in the Mirrorworld and the Goyl, a race of human-like figures with skin of stone, Will falls victim to a fairy's curse and is turning into a Goyl. In a desperate race against time to save his brother from this fate, Jacob leads a group through the dark and dangerous Mirrorworld, searching for a cure. Cornelia Funke's story (Little, Brown, 2010) features another intriguing world ripe for exploration, and Elliot Hill's solid narration breathes life into her colorful cast of characters. He creates unique voices for the many characters: adding a sniveling quality to the opportunistic dwarf Jacob coerces into helping him, giving the human Empress's voice an appropriately regal tone, and making Will's voice more detached and distant as the stone spreads through his body. The story is told primarily from Jacob's point of view, and occasionally it is difficult to distinguish his thoughts from spoken dialogue, but this is a small quibble in an otherwise well-executed performance. Fans will eagerly await a sequel.-Amanda Raklovits, Champaign Public Library, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Warning! This book contains fairies. And dwarves. And elves. There's even talk of dragons. I apologise for being so blunt but there's no easy way to break this kind of news. Fantasy of this nature (with a very capital F) is Marmite stuff, and there's little that can be done to soften the impact if you're not a Fan. Talking of capitalisation, I should really have given capitals to all the fantasy-world denizens listed above because that's what Funke has done, as if trying to ascribe nationalities to them. And it's not just the beings we're familiar with - she also does the same with her own creations, notably the Goyl, a humanoid race who provide the necessary strand of cold-blooded menace in the book. They are a species most notable for having stone for skin, which comes in many semi-precious varieties - a rather beautiful idea. Into this world step Jacob and Will, not brothers Grimm but brothers Reckless, following their father, John Reckless, who passed through a mirror in his study long ago and disappeared. As the novel gets moving, we learn that Jacob has in fact spent many years visiting the Mirrorworld, a place where he has made friends and enemies, worked, fought, killed and fallen in love. Now Will, discovering the secret of the mirror, has followed him and promptly been slashed by the claws of a Goyl, as a result of which he is slowly turning into one of the stone-skinned beasts and losing his personality in the process. Jacob, with the assistance of Will's girlfriend, Clara, and Fox, a shapeshifting girl, determines to prevent his brother's demise. What ensues is a fast-paced romp through the world of fairytales. For it's not just dwarves and fairies that we meet in Reckless. The book nods at almost every fairy story you've ever encountered - Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, the Frog Prince and so on - and features many other beings and objects from old stories: unicorns and the Lorelei, seven-league boots and Rapunzel's hair. Mucking about with fairytales is an idea we're well used to now - witness the Shrek franchise, Tangled and their ilk. So what saves this book from being merely a smorgasbord of the fantastic? Two things. First: the confidence with which Funke has created her world, being careful not to explain new ideas any more thoroughly than the ones with which she knows we'll be familiar. This creates a mixture of recognition and uncertain discovery that keeps the book from being mundane. Secondly, as the plot thickens, incorporating the political intrigues of the Mirrorworld, with the fate of our heroes dependent upon the machinations of kings, empresses, princesses and generals, it is the genuine human dramas of love, desire, loyalty and betrayal that bind. Jacob and Will's already strained relationship, and that of their girlfriends, is further tested in very un-fairytale-like ways. Funke plays around with the "happily ever after" bit - and quite right too, for a proper reading of the stories that later became the Grimms', Perrault's, and Andersen's shows us what brutal, dark and conflicted things they really are. Marcus Sedgwick's Revolver is published by Orion. To order Reckless for pounds 5.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Marcus Sedgwick Talking of capitalisation, I should really have given capitals to all the fantasy-world denizens listed above because that's what Funke has done, as if trying to ascribe nationalities to them. And it's not just the beings we're familiar with - she also does the same with her own creations, notably the Goyl, a humanoid race who provide the necessary strand of cold-blooded menace in the book. They are a species most notable for having stone for skin, which comes in many semi-precious varieties - a rather beautiful idea. Into this world step Jacob and Will, not brothers Grimm but brothers Reckless, following their father, John Reckless, who passed through a mirror in his study long ago and disappeared. As the novel gets moving, we learn that Jacob has in fact spent many years visiting the Mirrorworld, a place where he has made friends and enemies, worked, fought, killed and fallen in love. - Marcus Sedgwick.
Kirkus Review
Funke deftly escorts readers on another fantasy adventure, this time to dark, enchanting Mirrorworld, a fairy-tale land inhabited by humans, faerie creatures and the Goyls, a warring stone race. Discovering a magical mirror with the evocative message, "The mirror will open only for he [sic] who cannot see himself," 12-year-old Jacob Reckless travels through it in search of his missing father. For 12 years Jacob secretly returns as a treasure seeker, trading in magical objects and creatures, until his younger brother Will follows him, is clawed by a Goyl and turns into stone. Battling time, Jacob confronts dangers in an abandoned gingerbread house, Sleeping Beauty's thorn castle, the Red Fairy's bower and the Goyl king's towers as he seeks the Dark Fairy to remove Will's evil spell. The fluid, fast-paced narrative exposes Jacob's complex character, his complicated sibling relationship and a densely textured world brimming with vile villains and fairy-tale detritus. An unresolved ending hints at future journeys through the mirror, while spot-art pencil sketches evoke the Grimm atmosphere. Masterful storytelling. (Fantasy. 10 up) ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
