A blot on the landscape?

Leaving behind a world of class divisions and clever caricatures, we crossed the boundary of the worlds and entered the fantasy land of Inkheart. Cosimo and I both like a lot of children’s fantasy – but not this one. In contrast to our previous read, this book was finished, but perhaps shouldn’t have been. The plot was clever, but the execution poor. The idea is that a writer’s stories become real and his characters turn on him, with both travelling back and forth between the real world and the story world. It should have been fun, but the characters were so uncompelling that, in contrast to Gogol, they left you wanting to put the book down rather than pick it up. The dangers never felt at all real, and the main villain never provided the menace (or the intelligence) that the role required. The language was also turgid, and we waded through it to the end and then thankfully turned our attention to The Hall of a Thousand Columns.