Reckless

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jacob has uncovered the doorway to another world, hidden behind a mirror. It is a place of dark magic and enchanted objects, scheming dwarves and fearsome ogres, fairies born from water and men born from stone. Here, he hunts for treasure and seeks adventure in the company of Fox - a beautiful, shape­shifting girl, who guides and guards him. But now Jacob's younger brother has followed him into the mirrored world, and all that was freedom has turned to fear. Because a deadly curse has been spoken; and Jacob must risk his life to reverse it, before his brother is turned to stone forever... Revised and updated by Cornelia Funke, The Petrified Flesh is the first book in the thrilling Reckless series.

I show more RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Don't mistake "young adult" for "fluffy." This story of brothers, orphaned early in life by a father whose abandonment of them without a word also cost them their mother to her grief, as they find the "Mirrorworld" that their father vanished into...inside his study!

This is a portal fantasy, with a secondary world that resembles our own enough to be an alternate-history world except for the fact that magic works. "Austry" is the name of the Mirrorworld country the brothers, and their father before him, arrive in, not the Austria they leave behind. The family's disintegration, as abetted by the mirror, is not something that the hero Jacob is trying to fix or to escape, like Meg in A Wrinkle in Time or the Pevensies in The Chronicle of Narnia. Jacob's a young adult, he fled into Mirrorworld to find a place for himself not look for someone else. Of course he finds others...a bad father-figure but a good mentor in Albert Chanute, innkeeper and treasure hunter in Austry, a girlfriend of sorts in Fox the shapeshifting...fox. He's got a life as a treasure hunter! He's met the Empress six times! (But don't tell Chanute that, he's only met her three times for treasure-hunting and now he's past it, so there'd be jealousy and trouble.)

The stakes this secondary world introduces to us could not be higher. Jacob's treasure-hunting ways are threatened by the Goyls, put a gar- in front and you'll get it, finally having effective leadership and thus starting to win battles in the eternal war between humans and their kind. What matters about that is that Will, Jacob's brother, has been bitten by a Goyl and is suffering the inexorable fate of such: He's turning into the stone creature that we call a Goyl but, since he's human, he won't survive the change. He will be a stone human...dead, but still walking without his soul. And Jacob, whose running away to find a life in this other world, now can't figure out how to save Will...and his refusal to share knowledge of Mirrorworld with Will is what left him susceptible to the bite in the first place. Oh! Wait! That's not enough pressure, not enough baggage. Will's utterly innocent girlfriend Clara finds the mirror and enters Mirrorworld, too!

Now, let me not spend more time in Spoilerville than is necessary. Will and Clara are serious Mary Sues. The world happens to them. They're not possessed of Jacob's trove of information...and this is something he quite rightly blames himself for not imparting to his adoring little brother. He spends just enough time recognizing that he's set these conditions in motion, and the success or failure of Will's future life among the living not-Goyls is entirely on him.

Celeste/Fox surprised me as a character. Will is younger than Jacob and he has a blah girlfriend, but Jacob's magical girlfriend is...a real full-bodied relationship partner! I wasn't thinking that would work in a kid-aimed story. But this, with its neither dwelt-on nor avoided sexuality and its frank presentation of bodily suffering...Chanute's arm is lost for a singularly stupid reason, for example, but it's before the story we're being told now starts, and is reported not experienced...is part of the not-quite-adult storytelling world. I'd give this to any sixteen-year-old and expect them to feel positive about it. Not younger, though. The consequences of stupid actions aren't minimized!

But sometimes, stupid people just can't be forced to stop being stupid. Clara simply can not be made to see what is completely obvious to the meanest intelligence: She is NOT in her own birth-world anymore and can NOT act like she's out for a particularly strange walk there! It gets wearing, her insistence that Jacob act as though her world's rules still hold sway. And he, fool of a man that he is, keeps explaining and explaining why her way won't work! Because she's unwilling to learn!

But Jacob...he's fighting through death and resurrection, he's fighting enemies he knows are enemies as well as friends he doesn't know are worse than enemies..."Who makes peace when you can have victory?" muses one such...Jacob fights until the fabric of Mirrorworld finally delivers him the thing he's consistently asked for, demanded, begged to receive. The thing he's died inside and out to cause to happen.

He's received the gift of an ending.

What a lovely way to make your portal fantasy pop! Make it such that there is no more severe betrayal that can occur to anyone in this world. Give everyone an ending. Then, stand back and watch the fun begin!

So perfect for its intended audience, so much in accord with the end-of-adolescence access of adult emotions but without the perspective to manage them. This should take the world by storm, and I hope it will. show less

Jacob and Will grew up without a father as John Reckless disappeared one day without a word, and has never been heard of again. When Jacob was twelve, he discovered that the mirror in his father’s study opened the door to another world, one where magic and the characters from fairy tales are real. Spending more and more time in the Mirrorworld, and building up a reputation as one of the best treasure hunters, Jacob hasn’t been the big brother that Will needed. One day Jacob is careless and his younger brother follows him through the mirror, but is hit by a curse that slowly turns him into a Goyl, ferocious creatures with skin of stone. Will Jacob be able to save his brother, and what will be the price?

I have to admit that I’m a show more sucker for fairy tales, especially dark ones. Reading this book was like reading darker versions of the tales I loved as a child, and while the plotting and the characterisation were a little uneven (I felt that Clara in particular was quite pale and under-used), I loved the atmosphere and the set-up, and Jacob and Fox are such wonderfully complex characters that I took to them at once. Like all the best fairy tales, it manages to make valid statements about love, loyalty and trust, and though of course the ending was a little predictable, it was the how? that really mattered and the final pages did not disappoint, so much so that I had to order the follow-up volume, Fearless, immediately after finishing it. I’m sure I will return to this series again and again. show less

Cornelia Funke has been one of my favorite authors for years-- I still have the worn-out copy of Inkheart that I bought with my allowance money when I was nine. So the news that she would be releasing a new novel-- the first in a series, no less-- for a somewhat older audience had me counting down to the release date.

Reckless does not disappoint. The world Funke has created in her latest book is at first strikingly similar to the world of her Inkheart trilogy, the major difference being that this world is entered through the surface of a mirror rather than the pages of a book. What amazes me, when I was a kid first falling in love with fantasy and now, when I've read about hundreds of fantasy worlds, is her ability to create show more characters and creatures that are nothing close to anything anybody else has thought of. In Reckless, Funke does it again: she introduces us to the Goyle, a race of people made of stone, a hauntingly bizarre creature known only as the Tailor, and a race of faeries who seem set to defy current stereotypes.

That said, the world of Reckless is so complex that it tends to leave readers wanting, and maybe a little confused. My biggest peeve with the story is that it centers on 24-year old Jacob Reckless's journey through the Mirrorworld to save his brother Will from becoming a human Goyle-- stone man. Yet Jacob first entered the Mirrorworld twelve years ago, as told in the Prologue. I wanted to know more about Jacob's adventures when he was younger, how he became a renowned thief and adventurer in his new-found world and how he first met Fox-- the shapeshifter girl who accompanies him on his travels and who so often wears her vulpine pelt that she's nearly forgotten what it's like to be human. Fox is definitely the most intriguing character in the book, and there already seems to be a triangle forming with her, Jacob, and Clare-- Will's girlfriend-- on the different angles. Reckless is largely a plot-driven novel, with a story that would make a brilliant bedtime story were it not for the creepiness of the creatures, and I guess, a few mature themes. It's definitely written for an older audience than Funke's other books-- Inkheart, Thief Lord, Dragon Rider, etc. The prose is lovely as ever...reading books-in-translation always makes me wonder if the original novel is so beautifully-written, or if that's the work of the translator? Either way, I can hardly wait for the yet-untitled sequel.

Altogether Reckless is an engrossing read, the sort of book you tear through in as few sittings as possible, only taking little breaks from the building suspense and intriguing story-world only to admire Funke's beautiful pencil illustrations arching over the frequent chapter titles. show less

Summary: When Jacob Reckless was very young, his father disappeared. Once Jacob got a little older, he followed in his father's footsteps: disappearing into the mirror in his father's study, into the Mirrorworld, a world that is full of fairy tale creatures - both the good and the evil. One day, when he was 25, his younger brother Will followed him through the mirror, but he was quickly injured by the power of the Dark Fairy... and that injury is spreading, turning Will's skin into stone: the mark of a Goyl, a race of powerful and inhuman soldiers. Jacob is determined to find a cure for his brother, so they set off, accompanied by Clara, Will's girlfriend who followed him through the mirror, and Fox, a shape-shifter girl who has been show more Jacob's long-time companion inside the Mirrorworld. Along the way, they must face not only terrors from the darkest hearts of fairy tales, but also their own hopelessness and despair, for Will's humanity is slipping away, and their quest seems all but futile.

Review: Reckless is an great example of a book with a fantastic premise and tons of narrative possibilities, that nevertheless doesn't quite manage to live up to its potential. Funke has a knack for creating fairy-tale worlds out of the darkest materials possible, and while Inkworld was new, Mirrorworld is straight out of the Grimm Brothers (not coincidentally, also a Jacob & Will duo), with none of the Disney-fied sugar coating. It felt like stepping into the medieval Black Forest, and there's a broad suggestion that the Grimms created their stories out of their experiences in Mirrorworld, instead of the other way around. Hansel & Gretel and Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and countless others all show up in Reckless, if not in person then certainly in thematic and plot elements. It's a bit of a mishmash, but it runs according to the familiar logic of fairy tales, so the result is a world both immediately familiar and terrifyingly foreign, and rife with possibilities for stories to tell.

And Jacob's story has the potential to be a good one. Its themes - of guilt and betrayal and obligation and family, and of how far those things can drive a person even when set against all better judgement and logic - are not only fairly unusual ones for children's fiction, but are also pretty dark in and of themselves, more so than would be suggested by the suggested pre-teen age range. Jacob's inner demons are just as powerful as the fairy-tale monsters he has to face, and it lends the story an emotional complexity I wasn't expecting.

Where Reckless fell short of its potential for me was that it didn't spend enough time exploring all of these complexities. It is a relatively short book (less than 7 hours of audio), and it is breathlessly fast-paced. Too much so, in fact; it was so fast-moving that it was easy to get a little lost, and difficult to keep tabs on how the characters had gotten from point A to point B in just a few minutes, and why. A lot of crucial details went by with minimal to no explanation, and I think Funke would have been better served by slowing down, and giving her characters - and her story - time to breathe and grow in between all of the action sequences. The basic materials of a great book are all there, but it seems like in trying to pitch the book towards a younger audience - a strange choice, given the ages of the characters, the nature of some of the themes, and the overall darkness of the story - Funke shortchanged the very things that would make it most interesting as a crossover read for adults. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: It's not without its flaws, but I think Reckless is still worth picking up for anyone who likes darker fairy tale retellings, or who enjoys Funke's imaginative world-building. show less

I was somewhat surprised by this book, mainly because it seems to be oriented toward an older audience than most of the novels I have read by this author. Though we get a glimpse of them as children, for the body of the novel the protagonists, Jacob and Will (and, yes, this book is chock full of Grimm references), are much older than those of books like 'Dragon Rider' and 'Inkheart'. The creatures of the MirrorWorld, into which these two young men have wandered, are often sinister and violent. That world itself is, as we discover, on the cusp of change, with a war ending and technologies shifting toward the industrial.

In many ways, this novel is melancholy. At times it feels like an elegy for the impossible -- the magic objects of show more Grimm's fairy tales are locked in the museums of Empresses and Emperors; the bright creatures of Fairyland are dirtied by clouds of coal smoke and the trappings of early modern life -- and all those things that we, the readers of childhood and adulthood, would expect to be wondrous and magical taste of a bitter reality. The characters in the novel, especially Jacob, perceive this in a variety of ways, but they do not fight it. In retrospect, that feels frustrating, but it is a part of the grittier portrait within which Funke is working here.

I suspect that many readers who are used to the more hopeful worlds in Ms. Funke's other novels may be disappointed by this book's darkness. The climactic scene, while I won't give it away, is startlingly bleak -- it offers an unheroic consequence to an impossible choice -- and the end, which leaves the door open for further installments, is only barely hopeful.

For me, though, the novel worked. I found in it a sense of disillusionment that seems to be appropriate for a teen audience -- an age where the stuff of edited nursery fairy tales has become entirely too unlikely and the world seems tainted anyway -- and that was consistent with the quest plot and the finely woven details that clothed it. I was not composing a review as I read -- a sign of a truly engaging story -- and I felt the emotional context strongly, especially in that climactic scene.

Bottom line: I liked this one, but I suspect that some others will strongly dislike it, especially if they have approached it with very different expectations. show less

Ever since his father's disappearance, Jacob Reckless has looked out for his mother and younger brother, Will. One day while searching his father's office, young Jacob finds a mirror that brings him into a world where fairy tales are real - but much like those of another pair of brothers, the world can be dark and deadly. Twelve years later, Will follows his brother into the Mirrorworld, where he is attacked by the Goyl and begins turning into one of them, his skin becoming jade. Prophecies of the Jade Goyl say that he will make their king invincible, but Jacob will do everything in his power to save his brother from becoming one of them.

Ever since I read The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke has been one of my go-to authors. Her worlds are show more sometimes dark but always compelling. The Mirrorworld has everything fearful from fairy tales, but the machinations, jealousy, and love of its characters make it seem as real as our own world where "happily ever after" rarely comes without a price. The ending leaves an opening for more books to come, and I hope that's the case. show less

In the first book of the Mirrorworld series, readers meet the troubled Reckless family. The father has recently disappeared, and Jacob and Will are trying to understand their new life while their mother drowns in her grief. Jacob searches his father's study at night, when his mother can't stop him, looking for clues to his father's whereabouts. The first chapter opens on such a night, as twelve-year-old Jacob finds a clue scribbled on notepaper he hasn't seen before. It is a riddle about the bizarre mirror hanging on a wall. Jacob tries to unravel the puzzle, which is about a person not seeing to enter the mirror, and eventually he covers his eyes in the glass's reflection with his hand. Instantly, the room in the reflection changes. He show more turns around, and discovers he is no longer in his father's study. He is almost immediately attacked by a strange and small creature with sharp teeth. Jacob escapes back into his father's study by covering his eyes in the mirror that is hanging in the wall of the strange room. He may be back in his own world, but now he knows his father's secret, and he doesn't plan on sharing it with anyone, not even his little brother Will.

The second chapter jumps forward in time twelve years. Jacob is back in the Mirror world, and this time, Will is with him. Thanks to internal meditations, the reader learns that Jacob has been a frequent visitor to his secret world, disappearing more and more, just like his father. Over the course of twelve years, his brother began to view him as unreliable as their dad, Jacob became a famous treasure hunter in Mirrorworld and found a friend in the shape-shifting girl Fox, and their mother died. After his mother's death, Jacob was restless to escape to his other world, and living up to his name, he slips up and lets his brother see him. Will follows him into the world, but it gets worse. They are attacked by Goyl - stone men no doubt inspired by Gargoyles - and Will is infected with their curse. Some men struck by a Goyl become a Man Goyl, as their skin is replaced with stone, thanks to the magic of the Dark Fairy, the mistress to the Goyl king.

The complications pile on for Jacob and his brother. Will's girlfriend, Clara, discovers the secret of the mirror after Will calls her, and she arrives and joins their party. Everyone tells Jacob that there is no way to reverse the Dark Fairy's curse, but he is determined. He risks his life over and over to save his brother. As Will's skin hardens, so does his emotions - Goyl are known for their rage and impatience. After several near-death experiences, Jacob learns that he must destroy the Dark Fairy to have his brother back. By this point, though, the Dark Fairy is hunting them. Goyl stories prophesy that a Jade Goyl will emerge to make their king invincible, and it turns out that Will's growing green skin is the only jade stone in the land. Still, Jacob is willing to walk into the heart of the trouble if it means saving his brother.

I admire Cornelia Funke, and bought this book with no knowledge of the series, inspired solely by her skills as a writer. Fortunately, I loved it. The Mirrorworld is an amazing place, composed of magic and burgeoning technology like trains and cameras. The place has a steampunk feel. Moreover, the world is built out of fairy tales. Not the sanitized versions with happy endings, but grim interpretations closer to the heart or original fairy tales. In this world, sleeping beauty may never be saved by her prince, instead sleeping in an eternity of living death. In this world, the tailor really does carve men up and makes clothes out of their skin, and watermen lure maidens down into their watery caves to be their captive brides. Yet this world also has flowers that will change a woman into the most beautiful creature with just one sniff, magic keys that can unlock any door, and dragons and unicorns and fairies. It is a land both magical and beautiful, terrible and frightening, all at once.

The characters are as compelling as the world they inhabit. Jacob is a dashing hero. He buries all his emotion, but with his brother intruding in his secret world, cracks begin to appear in his armor. Will is the kinder and more obedient brother, but as he turns into a Goyl he is becoming even harder than Jacob. In addition to the complicated relationship between brothers, there is the romance between Will and Clara, Jacob and Fox's friendship (which Fox wishes were more), and the strange feelings brewing between Jacob and Clara. Throw the back-stabbing and greedy dwarf Valiant into the mix, and the plot is seeded with messy feelings and interactions. A busy plot allows for plenty of confrontation and character development, and the action is suspenseful and woven around multiple fairy tales. I greatly enjoyed stepping into this world, and then look forward to visiting Mirrorworld again in future books in the series. show less