The second volume in this series is reviewed elsewhere on my blog.
I seem to have a finely-honed skill for picking up a novel that looks interesting and getting it home only to discover that it's part of a series, and it's also not the first in the series. This seems to happen almost routinely with audio books - which are not, in my experience, known for being very forthcoming in this regard (or in any useful regard for that matter).
Anyway, that's what happened here. Fearless is volume 2 in a series referred to as 'Mirrorworld", and which begins with Reckless and ends with Heartless - which is a terribly foreboding title given the subject of volume two! The problem here is that telling me that a volume is a "Mirrorworld novel" is not the same thing as telling me that it's 'Mirrorworld #2'! Big Publishing™ doesn't seem to get simple niceties like that. As Kristen cashore showed admirably with her Graceling and Fire, and Bitterblue series, you can have three novels in the same world, none of which is necessarily or critically dependent upon the others for enjoyment. They're in the same world, and are sequential in a sense, but they're not three episodes of the same story.
All this to explain why the only reason I picked up this novel after reading its sequel, Fearless, unintentionally out of order (and disliking it), was that I very much liked the character of Fox. I wanted to learn of her origins, and of how she and Jacob got together, but after starting the second novel feeling not so much like I was stepping into the middle of things, I started the first novel feeling like this was at least the second in a series and I'd missed the previous volumes! How weird is that? And it told me squat about Fox. Thanks for wasting my precious life, mother Funke.
So yes, the biggest problem I ha with this volume was that I was really disappointed to discover that the entire Fox encounter had been completely bypassed! The first few pages deal with Jacob and Will when they were kids and Jacob first discovered the mirror through which he could pass into an alternate fairy-tale reality. Right after that, a dozen years pass in nothing more than a chapter header, and all the fun stuff has gone by. Instead of finding Jacob and Will exploring the Mirrorworld together and carrying us along with them, Will is already vicariously cursed by Bad Fairy via a Goyl, and is in process of turning into stone, and Jacob is a grown man, already partnered with Fox and searching for a cure. In short, this novel is exactly like the second one, no Wills, very little Fox, and Jacob running around like a headless chicken. I have to say I was truly disappointed.
Both novels make a big deal about Jacob entering this mirror world to track down his father, but at no point in either novel is he ever actually engaged in this pursuit! We get a plethora of references to fun fairy-tale things which Jacob has discovered in his forays, and nary a mention of his forlorn pursuit of dad. That was just dumb. For that matter, we're never treated to any stories of Jacob actually recovering any of these fun fairy-tale items we're repeatedly told he's collected. That's where Funke screws this up.
This novel was really precisely like it's successor (or that precisely like this) in that the only thing Jacob is engaged upon in both volumes is pursuit of a cure. In this volume, the cure is for his brother, and in the next volume the cure is for himself since he screwed up curing his brother and ended up being cursed himself. How many volumes of Jacob the screw-up can one person be expected to read? Well, I exceeded my limit at one and then foolishly went back for another hoping that it would entertain me and allow me to meet a really cool character. But once again I was disappointed. I'm done Funke-ing around with this author.
