burniereads's review against another edition
3.0
I have really mixed opinions on this one. I think one of the problems was I read this thinking it was a standalone so the pacing felt kind of off. Now that I know this is part of a series, the pacing makes more sense. I enjoyed the writing, although some things were inevitably a bit off due to translation, and I was never bored. The characters are really cool and the world is super interesting, but I just kind of got annoyed at how many times Jacob would get like this close to fixing everything and then mess it all up (not saying he messed it up, more so the characters around him or the plot).
munderoon's review against another edition
4.0
I won't tell anything about this book, because it starts right from the beginning with a major plot twist. You won't be bored with this book, but you won't be happy either. I guess, this book comes to live through the sadness it is spreading. The end was ... well, it just went full circle-like and that was kinda weird, because there's a second book and I'm not sure, how things will work out. I'm confused, what the plot will be. But also hugely excited! So. Go and read this book! It's the first book of Cornelia Funke, that I liked - guess because it's darker and kind of grown-up. Definitely going to keep up with the series! (Books, books, books, books - Tabi is repeating her favorite word again :D)
juliwi's review against another edition
3.0
Cornelia Funke has owned my heart ever since my father read me Inkheart for the first time. Naturally he read it to me in German and I loved how she literally brought her characters to live from the pages. There is a magic in words and like other authors, Neil Gaiman comes to mind, Funke knows, appreciates and uses this. So of course I wanted to check out her newest and latest! Thanks to Pushkin Children's and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
The best thing about The Petrified Flesh, the first book in Funke's new trilogy Reckless, is that the fantasy world she creates is fascinating. A beautiful conglomeration of everything to be found in the Grimms' Fairytales, the world behind the mirror is full of magic, witches, fairies, elves, and whatever else you can think of. One of the big joys reading this book is stumbling upon another little Grimms' gem you had forgotten about until it reappeared in Funke's pages.
Usually Funke's strength is her story-telling, the weaving together of different fascinating characters and storylines through beautiful prose. Although the beautiful prose still survives into the translation, there are parts of the novel that feel ill-timed. The beginning is too sudden, too quick, introducing a whole range of characters and creatures but not giving the reader enough time to get acquainted with either, let alone start caring for any of them. Although this does improve, it can make the first 70 or so pages of the book a bit of a test. What kept me going was an interest in the world, not any of the human main characters. Conversely, it was the Goyl who I found most interesting and I loved the chapters dedicated to them. What makes the odd pacing especially confusing is that The Petrified Flesh definitely seems to be meant for younger readers, between middle-grade and YA. The chapters are short and sweet, clearly plot-driven and there is little exposition. Each chapter is introduced by a pretty illustration but there is no sense of large world-building as in novels like The Lord of the Rings or even the Narnia chronicles, which, in my opinion, falls within the same reader group. Perhaps for younger readers the pace and motions of the plot will be just fine, but for me they felt off and I found it hard to connect with the novel initially.
Perhaps I was too old for this novel, since the pacing and depth of Reckless: The Petrified Flesh didn't work for me. However, I really appreciated the beauty of Funke's prose and the pleasurable dip back into Grimms' fairy tales. The one think Funke and Wigram have definitely achieved is making me desperate to reread them classics. I'd recommend this to fans of Middle Grade and YA Fantasy.
For full review: http://universeinwords.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-reckless-i-petrified-flesh-by.html
The best thing about The Petrified Flesh, the first book in Funke's new trilogy Reckless, is that the fantasy world she creates is fascinating. A beautiful conglomeration of everything to be found in the Grimms' Fairytales, the world behind the mirror is full of magic, witches, fairies, elves, and whatever else you can think of. One of the big joys reading this book is stumbling upon another little Grimms' gem you had forgotten about until it reappeared in Funke's pages.
Usually Funke's strength is her story-telling, the weaving together of different fascinating characters and storylines through beautiful prose. Although the beautiful prose still survives into the translation, there are parts of the novel that feel ill-timed. The beginning is too sudden, too quick, introducing a whole range of characters and creatures but not giving the reader enough time to get acquainted with either, let alone start caring for any of them. Although this does improve, it can make the first 70 or so pages of the book a bit of a test. What kept me going was an interest in the world, not any of the human main characters. Conversely, it was the Goyl who I found most interesting and I loved the chapters dedicated to them. What makes the odd pacing especially confusing is that The Petrified Flesh definitely seems to be meant for younger readers, between middle-grade and YA. The chapters are short and sweet, clearly plot-driven and there is little exposition. Each chapter is introduced by a pretty illustration but there is no sense of large world-building as in novels like The Lord of the Rings or even the Narnia chronicles, which, in my opinion, falls within the same reader group. Perhaps for younger readers the pace and motions of the plot will be just fine, but for me they felt off and I found it hard to connect with the novel initially.
Perhaps I was too old for this novel, since the pacing and depth of Reckless: The Petrified Flesh didn't work for me. However, I really appreciated the beauty of Funke's prose and the pleasurable dip back into Grimms' fairy tales. The one think Funke and Wigram have definitely achieved is making me desperate to reread them classics. I'd recommend this to fans of Middle Grade and YA Fantasy.
For full review: http://universeinwords.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-reckless-i-petrified-flesh-by.html
almaylu's review against another edition
5.0
Diese Geschichte hat sich definitiv bewährt und ich lese sie immer wieder.
themuffinjoke's review against another edition
2.0
For the record, the two stars is for the worldbuilding, because that’s the only thing I enjoyed about this book. Which is disappointing, because this is the kind of book I should have loved. I know some issues with translation might have been responsible for the book’s overall lackluster quality (pun unintended). But I’ve read translated books before, and they didn’t bore me as bad as this.
Everything about the story felt rushed and poorly fleshed out, as if we were reading one long summary rather than a story. We’re launched into the main conflict—Jacob trying to save his younger brother from being turned into a creature of jade stone—without much chance to orient ourselves, which is fine. Except it wasn’t like being thrown headfirst into a rich world full of history, where everyone had these deep and interesting backstories that would be fed to us in bits as the story went on, gilding the plot and adding depth and a sense of grounding. It was more like Funke just cobbled together a bunch of mythical things, relying on readers’ familiarity with/affinity for fairy-tale tropes, and gave each of her characters a one-line description that she just sticks to unwaveringly for the whole novel. “Novel” actually feels like the wrong word. It read like a short story or excerpt extended for 400~ pages. For all the pretty, dangerous landscapes and creatures and gadgets, it was so darn boring. (I did really like all the cool magical items. If only they hadn’t been so stupidly convenient to the plot when Jacob needed them, with the occasional drawback here and there, whoop-de-doo.)
I do wonder if part of the problem is that the plot itself is quite simplistic, and boils down to one thing: Jacob’s Gotta Save Will. But I can think of other books I’ve read with a fairly simple through line, and I’ve often liked the intensity and suspense of such a narrowly focused plot. When it’s done well. There was also just a lot of backstory that was mentioned off-handedly and then forgotten about. It was a very lazy attempt at padding the current events with precedent, and also giving Jacob all these convenient ways of solving problems because hey, he knows this one person from this one time when he found a Magical Doohickey and now this one person from his past who doesn’t actually matter can help him out yay. These flashes of backstory—mostly Jacob’s—crop up again and again, and it was annoying because some of that shit sounded more interesting than the shit I was reading. Other times, more explanation was necessary, and we just never get it, because Reasons. If she’s saving it all up for the next books, well. There’s a reason first impressions are kind of a big deal.
I didn’t care about any of the protagonists. Not Jacob, who was endlessly gloomy and angsty at his best and a boring jerk at his worst. Not Will, who was basically an innocent cinnamon roll until he got turned into crystal Hulk. Not Clara, who spent the entire novel being wispy and waifish and tempting Jacob with her … wispy waifishness? The “romantic tension” between them was so deathly dull and unconvincing. I didn’t even have the energy to roll my eyes every time Jacob thought about her. (Never directly about her, mind. Just her being with him.) Not to mention it's your brother's freaking girlfriend and there is no justification for you to just be randomly obsessed with her, but whatever. Even Fox, who is my favorite of the bunch and should have been an awesome character, quite literally wavered between being a Disneyesque talking animal sidekick and a lovesick teenager who for some reason devotes her entire life to this guy who’s always either abandoning her or using her because she has more common sense than all the rest of them put together. And I guess the Dwarf, Valiant, was there for like, comic relief or something? To get Jacob in and out of places with zero effort while making snarky commentary? I don’t even know.
The antagonists weren’t much better. The Goyl were the most interesting part of the world for me, but Funke wrote them all as if they were a stereotype. That’s pretty much how she wrote all the races and creatures of this world, but it was most disappointing with the Goyl, who are among the most unique fantasy peoples I’ve read about in a while. I loved the descriptions of their various skins, made of onyx or jasper or carnelian, how their social hierarchy is structured around the stone of your skin, how females are laced with amethyst (I wondered if there were Goyl made completely of amethyst, male or female, and what such a skin would represent in that society), the details about their biology and the ever-present rage under their skin that seems analogous to the heat beneath the Earth’s crust, and the beauty and ingenuity of their underground cities. But in the end they all only amounted to angry rock-people, with the exception of their king, Kami’en, who’s there to be a kingly general-king and that’s about it.
Don’t even get me started on the other fairy-tale races. Caricatures, all of them. When Jacob enters the realm of the most powerful race of all, the immortal Fairies, I was so bored I could’ve napped for a thousand years like poor Sleeping Beauty. I gave no shits about the Red Fairy or her “Dark” sister, both of whom were beautiful and boring and ugh shut up. The “Dark” fairy’s motivation for being all “dark” and whatever seemed to be her uber-deep love for Kami’en, and I’m like, k. Seriously, how do you make Fairies, Dwarves, Unicorns, and people made of freaking semi-precious stones so boring?
The book’s saving grace was the writing, which by itself had a metaphorical, pseudo-literary feel that I’m not accustomed to reading in genre fiction, and some lines which I liked very much. There’s so much texture and tactile details to the descriptions as well, which really served the story’s underlying themes about changing skins, the value of tangible, sought-after things, and encroaching technology in a magical world. But the overall effect was like draping a cheap tiny plastic Christmas tree from Walmart in glittering tinsel and expecting me to be amazed. Instead, it was just awkward, and had the effect of making it seem like Funke was trying to make the story more complex and nuanced than it really was. Again, this could be a translation issue, but I do think Funke was going for a kind of ethereal, fairy-tale style here that just didn’t suit the simplistic, shallow trappings of the story itself.
So yeah. That was that. It sucks too because I’ve heard good things about the rest of the series but as of right now I just don’t care about this world or the people.
Everything about the story felt rushed and poorly fleshed out, as if we were reading one long summary rather than a story. We’re launched into the main conflict—Jacob trying to save his younger brother from being turned into a creature of jade stone—without much chance to orient ourselves, which is fine. Except it wasn’t like being thrown headfirst into a rich world full of history, where everyone had these deep and interesting backstories that would be fed to us in bits as the story went on, gilding the plot and adding depth and a sense of grounding. It was more like Funke just cobbled together a bunch of mythical things, relying on readers’ familiarity with/affinity for fairy-tale tropes, and gave each of her characters a one-line description that she just sticks to unwaveringly for the whole novel. “Novel” actually feels like the wrong word. It read like a short story or excerpt extended for 400~ pages. For all the pretty, dangerous landscapes and creatures and gadgets, it was so darn boring. (I did really like all the cool magical items. If only they hadn’t been so stupidly convenient to the plot when Jacob needed them, with the occasional drawback here and there, whoop-de-doo.)
I do wonder if part of the problem is that the plot itself is quite simplistic, and boils down to one thing: Jacob’s Gotta Save Will. But I can think of other books I’ve read with a fairly simple through line, and I’ve often liked the intensity and suspense of such a narrowly focused plot. When it’s done well. There was also just a lot of backstory that was mentioned off-handedly and then forgotten about. It was a very lazy attempt at padding the current events with precedent, and also giving Jacob all these convenient ways of solving problems because hey, he knows this one person from this one time when he found a Magical Doohickey and now this one person from his past who doesn’t actually matter can help him out yay. These flashes of backstory—mostly Jacob’s—crop up again and again, and it was annoying because some of that shit sounded more interesting than the shit I was reading. Other times, more explanation was necessary, and we just never get it, because Reasons. If she’s saving it all up for the next books, well. There’s a reason first impressions are kind of a big deal.
I didn’t care about any of the protagonists. Not Jacob, who was endlessly gloomy and angsty at his best and a boring jerk at his worst. Not Will, who was basically an innocent cinnamon roll until he got turned into crystal Hulk. Not Clara, who spent the entire novel being wispy and waifish and tempting Jacob with her … wispy waifishness? The “romantic tension” between them was so deathly dull and unconvincing. I didn’t even have the energy to roll my eyes every time Jacob thought about her. (Never directly about her, mind. Just her being with him.) Not to mention it's your brother's freaking girlfriend and there is no justification for you to just be randomly obsessed with her, but whatever. Even Fox, who is my favorite of the bunch and should have been an awesome character, quite literally wavered between being a Disneyesque talking animal sidekick and a lovesick teenager who for some reason devotes her entire life to this guy who’s always either abandoning her or using her because she has more common sense than all the rest of them put together. And I guess the Dwarf, Valiant, was there for like, comic relief or something? To get Jacob in and out of places with zero effort while making snarky commentary? I don’t even know.
The antagonists weren’t much better. The Goyl were the most interesting part of the world for me, but Funke wrote them all as if they were a stereotype. That’s pretty much how she wrote all the races and creatures of this world, but it was most disappointing with the Goyl, who are among the most unique fantasy peoples I’ve read about in a while. I loved the descriptions of their various skins, made of onyx or jasper or carnelian, how their social hierarchy is structured around the stone of your skin, how females are laced with amethyst (I wondered if there were Goyl made completely of amethyst, male or female, and what such a skin would represent in that society), the details about their biology and the ever-present rage under their skin that seems analogous to the heat beneath the Earth’s crust, and the beauty and ingenuity of their underground cities. But in the end they all only amounted to angry rock-people, with the exception of their king, Kami’en, who’s there to be a kingly general-king and that’s about it.
Don’t even get me started on the other fairy-tale races. Caricatures, all of them. When Jacob enters the realm of the most powerful race of all, the immortal Fairies, I was so bored I could’ve napped for a thousand years like poor Sleeping Beauty. I gave no shits about the Red Fairy or her “Dark” sister, both of whom were beautiful and boring and ugh shut up. The “Dark” fairy’s motivation for being all “dark” and whatever seemed to be her uber-deep love for Kami’en, and I’m like, k. Seriously, how do you make Fairies, Dwarves, Unicorns, and people made of freaking semi-precious stones so boring?
The book’s saving grace was the writing, which by itself had a metaphorical, pseudo-literary feel that I’m not accustomed to reading in genre fiction, and some lines which I liked very much. There’s so much texture and tactile details to the descriptions as well, which really served the story’s underlying themes about changing skins, the value of tangible, sought-after things, and encroaching technology in a magical world. But the overall effect was like draping a cheap tiny plastic Christmas tree from Walmart in glittering tinsel and expecting me to be amazed. Instead, it was just awkward, and had the effect of making it seem like Funke was trying to make the story more complex and nuanced than it really was. Again, this could be a translation issue, but I do think Funke was going for a kind of ethereal, fairy-tale style here that just didn’t suit the simplistic, shallow trappings of the story itself.
So yeah. That was that. It sucks too because I’ve heard good things about the rest of the series but as of right now I just don’t care about this world or the people.
yana_writer's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
rohkostjana's review against another edition
4.0
Still so, so good. Didn't remember much save for the premise and the ending, but I love love love Funke's writing. Jacob is still awfully likeable, and daringly toeing the line between empathy and sympathy. Onto the next one.
aomernik's review against another edition
3.0
Another book for Book Club...and it was better than the first one, trust me!! However, there were a few things that bugged me:
1. Ms. Funke has a tendency to be extremely flowery in descriping. In other words, she describes things and describes things, and describes things until you don't even know what she was describing in the first place. However, the action made up for that in part.
2. **spoiler alert** I understand that this is part of a series (or so I've heard), however, the ending wasn't satisfactory. Of course, they did end up accomplishing their designated mission--and Will was returned good-as-new, if you even CAN be as good as new when you were turned into stone and back again. But one thing that REALLY bothered me about the ending: Jacob and Fox did not end up together. Even if that happens in another book, I still think it should've happened now!!
3. Ms. Funke didn't go into detail about the little Jacob-Clara relationship other than the Larks' Water incident. It's a sort of tricky situation here (and I give Nicole all of the credit for bringing it fully to my attention): there's a love pentagon between Jacob, the Red Fairy, Fox, Clara, and Will. And although it's tricky, the author could have resolved it in the end. And I would've been okay if Jacob and Clara ended up together, too...:D Ohhhhh and then Will and Fox could end up together, because Will had a keen eye for Fox the minute she came into the scene, although he hid it from humanity...and--oh wait. I'm not supposed to rewrite this. Bah.
But, overall this book was quite an enjoyable ride (albeit a bit of a slow and sometimes tedious one)!
1. Ms. Funke has a tendency to be extremely flowery in descriping. In other words, she describes things and describes things, and describes things until you don't even know what she was describing in the first place. However, the action made up for that in part.
2. **spoiler alert** I understand that this is part of a series (or so I've heard), however, the ending wasn't satisfactory. Of course, they did end up accomplishing their designated mission--and Will was returned good-as-new, if you even CAN be as good as new when you were turned into stone and back again. But one thing that REALLY bothered me about the ending: Jacob and Fox did not end up together. Even if that happens in another book, I still think it should've happened now!!
3. Ms. Funke didn't go into detail about the little Jacob-Clara relationship other than the Larks' Water incident. It's a sort of tricky situation here (and I give Nicole all of the credit for bringing it fully to my attention): there's a love pentagon between Jacob, the Red Fairy, Fox, Clara, and Will. And although it's tricky, the author could have resolved it in the end. And I would've been okay if Jacob and Clara ended up together, too...:D Ohhhhh and then Will and Fox could end up together, because Will had a keen eye for Fox the minute she came into the scene, although he hid it from humanity...and--oh wait. I'm not supposed to rewrite this. Bah.
But, overall this book was quite an enjoyable ride (albeit a bit of a slow and sometimes tedious one)!
mikistone's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
lazygal's review against another edition
4.0
"Once upon a time" is a truly magical way to start a book, isn't it? Once again, Ms. Funke explores the world just beyond our own: in the Inkspell series, it was through the pages of a book into a world we'd never seen before, but here it's through a mirror into a world that we've caught glimpses of in other stories. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Hansel & Gretel and many more are suggested here, not quite named outright. Even the names of our two brothers, Jacob and Will, are familiar.
Perhaps because she's German, the book is Grimmishly dark (just think about the ending to Grimm's Cinderella story, not the lighter Perrault, or worse yet, the Disney, ending). It's not nightmare-dark, just shivvery dark and YA readers like that sort of read. There's Rapunzel hair and Lark Water and shape-shifting and the Goyl (a race of stonemen) and love and jealousy and a quest - all adding up to the nearly perfect read. If you've read a great number of fantasy books, you'll end up trying to match the various things in those books with things in this book and I'm not sure that one truly can (didn't stop me from trying, even when I knew it wasn't a match!).
So, the quibbles? It's another series starter. Enough already. Also, there are some pacing issues, with scenes sometimes rushing by. Of course, as with any book in translation, that might not be the case in the original. I wish I could give this a 4.5, because it's better than a 4 but doesn't quite reach a 5.
Copy provided by publisher.
Perhaps because she's German, the book is Grimmishly dark (just think about the ending to Grimm's Cinderella story, not the lighter Perrault, or worse yet, the Disney, ending). It's not nightmare-dark, just shivvery dark and YA readers like that sort of read. There's Rapunzel hair and Lark Water and shape-shifting and the Goyl (a race of stonemen) and love and jealousy and a quest - all adding up to the nearly perfect read. If you've read a great number of fantasy books, you'll end up trying to match the various things in those books with things in this book and I'm not sure that one truly can (didn't stop me from trying, even when I knew it wasn't a match!).
So, the quibbles? It's another series starter. Enough already. Also, there are some pacing issues, with scenes sometimes rushing by. Of course, as with any book in translation, that might not be the case in the original. I wish I could give this a 4.5, because it's better than a 4 but doesn't quite reach a 5.
Copy provided by publisher.