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A review by themuffinjoke
Reckless by Cornelia Funke
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.