The Colour of Revenge

Book Title: The Colour of Revenge

Author: Cornelia Funke

Series: Inkheart #4

Date Started: October 12th  2024

Date Completed: October 27th 2024

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure

Quality Rating: Five Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Five Star

Final Rating: Five Stars

Review:

Inkheart was always special in a way so few stories achieved - who could possibly top the idea that reading aloud could make the story real? That you could speak your most beloved, most feared, most magical characters, objects, worlds into being? It's so simple, as most good stories are, and I was not alone in being entirely enraptured by it as a child (made all the more precious because my mum read the whole thing to me at the time, too).

But, as much as I loved Mortimer, aspired to be Elinor, and felt very much like Meggie, who didn't really want to see the mythic heroes from the ink world on a true adventure of their own? Who didn't want to meet the Motley Folk, escape danger with the Black Prince, witness the Fire-Dancer's mastery of the flames? There were flickers of it in the original trilogy, but our wish is granted fully here and now. The Colour of Revenges is so immediately immersive - the prose, the imagination, the characters painting you into the story within mere moments and fragments of paragraphs - that the idea that you could speak aloud these characters and they would become real feels just as true as the first time I read about a battered book called Inkheart and the world inside of it.

I feel ambivalent about the continuation of beloved series - I do like letting a story be over at the original destination but, at this point, so many of them have done it and brought with them lovely new stories. There's a moment, towards the end of this book, where two of our most beloved heroes about about stories; where new ones start and old ones end. Literal or philosophical, it's something that could be a materialistic meta media moment it not spoken with feeling. But the enchanted inweave of Inkheart only ever speaks with feeling, even when she speaks through her characters; "In my experience, the story never ends. Only the heroes change."