I'm Being Held Prisoner by Cornelia Funke...

Several weeks ago my husband and I went to see the movie 'Inkheart'. I'd never read it, but the movie looked like it had possibilities --and I love children's books, and I usually like Brendan Frasier--so we went. And that was that, or so I thought.

The next day I was digging through my bookshelves, looking for a book to read, and came across a book that I had bought at the Book Fair at school a year or two ago (I had bought a huge stack of books! I felt very rich to have found so many books that looked like they might be good)-- one that I had never read: Inkspell...

Was it the book from the movie?
No! It was part two...
I didn't know there were TWO parts to the story...

Of course, as I began reading I immediately found discrepancies from the movie--before it took off into new territory--and of course, I was hooked.
But--Oh my goodness! What a slow-moving book!!! Yeah, I know I'm not a speed-reader... but this book is ridiculous!
And it's full of so much bleaknesss, and gruesome grossness, and unnecessary musings--mixed in with a great plot-line and amazing jewels of exposition, continuing on so s-l-o-w-l-y, switching narratives from character to character rather like 'Middlemarch' by George Eliot, or the 'Hearts of the Children' series by Dean Hughes, leaving you dangling only to have to go and listen to the plottings of one of the main bad guys, etc.

Yes, I was held prisoner. No computer time for me! Nope--no blogging! No Facebook! Each night I would get into bed with the book, determined to really make headway for sure, only to be lulled to sleep within half an hour (20 minutes?) by the s-l-o-w moving story line. (How was I ever going to get 'Mo' read into safety?? Why can't Fenoglio write to save him??? Where's Meggie?? What's my name?? Why am I reading this book?) (OK, it didn't help that I've had a serious cold-which makes my eyes bleary and my powers of concentration about nil.)

Finally, I was near the end of the 650+ pages. (How could this possibly be a children's book?) I couldn't take the need-to-know -how -it -was-all -going-to- end anymore!!! I went and hid so I could read the last 20 pages in peace, and Mo would finally be safe!!

I read the last page...

What??!!!

You have got to be kidding me!!??

I spent weeks for this???!!!

It left them all hanging there--all in peril!!

It was just like the time I made my husband take my to see the first installment of 'Lord of the Rings' - and when the movie ended, my husband was shocked!! Frodo and Sam go off into Mordor?? Merry and Pippin are captured by the Orcs!!?? Why did you take me to see this? What kind of ending is this??? (Well, I knew there were three books in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy....)

How come no one told me there were three books in the Inkworld...!???
(Or as Steve Martin would say in his Socrates skit: "How come no one told me hemlock was poison??" after he drinks the hemlock...)

So... I went to the book store. They didn't have the next book.

I went to another bookstore: Cha-ching! We have a winner, in hard-back...(thank goodness I came into the series late enough that the last book is already out in print!)

But am I really a winner? I'm still Cornelia Funke's prisoner-- every single night, slogging through the evil of the Adderhead, or the odious Orpheus, hoping to see. . . zzzzzzzz