A review by chuu_nyaz
Tintenblut by Cornelia Funke

3.0

3.5

I dont give half stars or write reviews but I feel like it was necessary here. Soooo I definitely liked this a bit less than the first book. some characters (cough fenoglio cough) really really annoyed me. the worldbuilding was one of the things i have less to complain about, ofcourse very nice and cool. I disliked how some characters interacted with and referred to each other like the black prince and violante. poor girl just wants to read and her husband freshly "back from the dead" to like her and what she gets in return is be a victim of unprovoked mysoginistic attacks from all sides. Now, i did like how the relationships between father child duos (farid and dustfinger and mo and meggie) were explored and portrayed. as mentioned above fenoglios character, especially how he interacted with "his World" really annoyed me to no end and I have multiple annotations just reading "SHUT UP ALREADY" when hes on Page. Since he has a pretty big role to play in this book, his appearances weren't few and far apart as I would've liked so im afraid a lot of the reason why I dislike this more than the previous one is because of that, as well as the whole relationship between meggie and farid, which just felt inauthentic? I feel like they would've been much better as besties or smth esp regarding their age difference and meggie being only at most 13. I also would've wished to have more point of views maybe? of elinor sure, but maybe even darius and roxane.
on to the good things; dustfinger and farid are my favs no competition, so this was definitely very nice to see explored more, farid with his enthusiasm to learning as much as he can from him, always fearing for dustfingers life and dustfinger just trying his best to enjoy his return and constantly catching strays, that poor man needs a break- I enjoyed the way the characters had such different views ob how they experience the inkworld, what their focus was in it and how they interacted with it. Overall it was still a pretty good book!