{"id":10131,"date":"2006-01-29T10:27:52","date_gmt":"2006-01-29T15:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/01\/29\/10131.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:49","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:49","slug":"book-report-inkspell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/01\/29\/book-report-inkspell\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Inkspell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My inclination, in writing about Inkspell<\/a> is to start with SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS and then to SPOIL the damned ending, only there isn’t any ending to spoil, damnit. Not only does it leave off with a here’s the beginning of the next book<\/I> bit, which is very annoying, but it’s even bad taken on its own terms. That is, even as an ending of the first part of the longer book, it’s awful.\n

Lois McMaster Bujold wrote an interesting essay about the series novel, and the challenges of making each book complete in itself, while still making each book move the series arc forward. You can argue how well Ms. Bujold succeeds in that, but anyway she lays out the problem pretty well. You don’t want people finishing a book all cross because there is too much left over. If you do put a cliffhanger of sorts at the end of a book, it has to be a satisfying one, and it can’t prevent the main plot of the book from coming to a proper close. On the other hand, you can’t wind up all the loose ends too neatly, or you’ll have to start all over again. Also, in a series novel, the continuing characters have to change each book (by virtue of the plot working on them), but still be the characters you like. And, of course, there’s all the stuff about how much backstory to include, how much to put in for the new readers of each book, how much for the old hands, etcetera etcetera. All that stuff? Not relevant to this book. It could have been, but it isn’t. Because Ms. Funke didn’ t write a novel in a series of novels, she just wrote six hundred pages of an open-ended ramble.\n

Not that there aren’t lovely bits in it. I mean, there are lots of lovely bits, and some of the plot points are particularly nice. Having the writer, within the novel, base a new character on a fellow he knows from our world, and then have that fellow come into the world of the novel and have to take on attributes of that character, well, that was all both very clever and very nicely handled. I like her writing, on the whole, and if I enjoyed this book less than the other three of hers I’ve read, I still enjoyed it quite a bit.\n

One other point. One of the ways in which Inkheart<\/a> charmed me was by having, at its heart, this magnificent book, Inkheart<\/i>, which we had never read because all the copies were destroyed, and which was so marvelous that when a particularly gifted reader read from it, the characters could break through into this world. We actually learned very little about the book. Well, glimpses, here and there, but mostly the book was mysterious, the object of the hunt, and it was easy to believe that there was, somewhere, this marvelous magical book. And, in fact, it was easy to believe that when Silvertongue read aloud from this particular magical book, anything could happen. When the ability to read people into and out of books opens up wider, it still seems to apply only to certain books, and when, in the climax of that book, the writer of the original book is enlisted to create more book to read from, it has that logical constistency that makes it work, for YHB, anyway.\n

Now, in Inkspell<\/I> (oh, and by the way, the original title is Tintenblut<\/I>, which I think is Inkblood<\/I>, a much better title), we are in<\/I> this magical book, which means it had better be pretty damn magical indeed, and it isn’t. Oh, it’s fine, but it’s nothing special. And, in fact, as if in recognition of that, the power to read people in and out of books becomes more general, so that Meggie (and Orpheus) can effectively read people into and out of scraps of rubbishy scribbling. That cheapens the power, but most of all, it cheapens the original book, which doubles the disappointment of finding ourselves actually in it. What I’m saying is, the whole thing is a mistake from beginning to end, and I’d rather Ms. Funke wrote something else entirely next. Of course, from the end of this one, it’s clear that she isn’t going to.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My inclination, in writing about Inkspell is to start with SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS and then to SPOIL the damned ending, only there isn\u2019t any ending to spoil, damnit. Not only does it leave off with a here\u2019s the beginning of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17672,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131\/revisions\/17672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}