Rating: WARTY!
Audio book Read by Elliot Hill. I review volume one in this trilogy elsewhere on my blog.
You know when I see a novel on the shelf and it says "A Mirrorworld story" that doesn't automatically convey to me that it's part of a sequential series for which you'd be well-advised to track-down volume one before you embark upon any others - and especially not if that same cover doesn't say "Mirrorworld #2" or something along those lines.
What such a note implies to me is that it's set in the same world as other volumes. It implies something like Kristin Cashore's Graceling and Fire, and Bitterblue, where the stories take place in the same world, but you can read them in any order and it makes no difference to your enjoyment. That's a world. If you're going to make them sequential then you really need to put something on your cover to indicate that!
Not that it really mattered here, to any tragic extent, but the bottom line is that words do matter, and I find it as disheartening as it is mind-boggling that the very people who ought to have the best handle on this - novel writers - are so evidently blind to the power and value of words. OTOH, writers typically have nothing whatsoever to do with their covers unless they self-publish, so I guess it comes right back down to Big Publishing™ being one of the most ass-backward, clueless, restrictive, unimaginative and monumentally screwed-up rats' nests of our time.
I'm not a fan of trilogies. Authors and publishers love them of course because it's the easiest and laziest way to milk money from the public, but I think they're way overdone and merely serve to stretch out a novel which could have been related quite thrillingly (or at least satisfactorily) in one volume, into something that's unwieldy and often frustrating or even boring. Case in point, the volume under scrutiny right here.
I was rather less than impressed with this volume. Clearly there's a history that you miss when entering this without reading volume one, but I really didn't feel like it was a hindrance - like I was missing anything. There was a lot of referencing of vol 1, but there didn't seem to be any understanding of what was going on here which was stymied (yes, stymied!) by my not having been there and done that. This story could be taken as a stand-alone.
The problem I had with it was that it was overly long, and rather dense, tedious, and rambling. I didn't like the main character, Jacob at all. He seemed too preoccupied and self-centered. Yes, he had some reason to be given his condition, but even so! Jacob is obviously a Grimm who isn't called Grimm (though that's precisely what he is: grim), but who is called Reckless for reasons which go unexplained here (and in the previous volume).
Jacob's problem is that he carries a dark fairy curse in the visible form of a moth on his chest - one which is in process of eating his heart out in six bites (one for each letter of the fairy's name), after which it will fly away taking his life with it. I have no idea what this means. Clearly it isn't literally eating his heart because after a couple of bites he would bleed out and die. Nonetheless, the moth sits there looking like a tattoo, garnering for itself a new wing-spot with each slow bite it takes, and engendering ever more pain as it eats. Dark fairies love them some pain, evidently.
My problem is that I didn't care. I initially thought that maybe I would have cared had I read the first volume, but no - I went back and read the first and was just as disappointed and disillusioned with that as I was with this one. This volume is what I have to deal with. Indeed, the only character I enjoyed and cared about was Jacob's companion Celeste, referred to as Fox for most of the story. She's a human who was evidently granted the ability to become a Vixen. Jacob met her in vol 1 when she was hardly more than a child, and he rescued her from a trap when she was in her fox form. Since then they've been companions.
Fox I found really intriguing, but she gets hardly any air-time here. Instead we get all Jacob all the time, pretty much, searching fruitlessly for a solution to his problem, running out of options, and largely ignoring everyone and everything else, including Fox. He doesn't even tell her what his problem is, so how close can they be? Yet Funke expects us to buy that there's a budding romance here.
Being a Grimm, sorry, a Reckless, Jacob has a brother named Will. Will had a curse upon him that Jacob saved him from in vol 1, by speaking the dark fairy's name, hence his own curse. The fact that Will isn't even in this story (I don't count the brief encounter at the beginning), and that his brother is dying, struck me as callous at best and evil at worst on Will's part. He evidently doesn't know about Jacob's curse - I guess he's thinks he was magically saved, but how close can these brothers be if they don't share these things? How dumb is Will exactly that he thinks his salvation cost nothing?
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.
I quickly tired of Jacob's non-stop wandering, poking around, and his endless failures. I could not become enamored of the story, and I have no desire to read volume three. Curiously, however, I was impressed enough by Fox that I decided I wanted to read volume one to learn her story, but while I'm reckless enough to do so, I'm not fearless. I fear that it will not impress me any more than this volume did. Is that heartless? As it happened, volume one tells us nothing of her either, so that was a waste of time, too.
