We only see what actually happened in a flashback later on, and it makes the story feel oddly untethered. And all those glimpses at fairy tale objects – the Glass Slipper, a Rapunzel Hair, the Wishing Table – were tantalising, hinting at a multitude of stories to be told in this wonderous, deadly world.Īn odd structural thing to begin with, is that the provoking moment of the entire plot – Will being attacked and infected by the Goyl – happens off-screen (as it were), between the ‘prologue’ section and the main story.
The fairy tale objects and characters are enchanting, but they feel real, and dangerous. Mirrorworld is so clear and concrete, which is presumably the result of Cornelia’s revision of The Petrified Flesh after she’d finished the first three books of the Reckless series. With the help of his long-time Mirrorworld companion, Fox, Will’s girlfriend and nurse Clara, and the greedy Dwarf Valiant, he must break the Dark Fairy’s curse over his brother before the stone consumes him. And as the stone creeps across Will’s soft, human skin, Jacob races to find something to bring his brother back from the cold, stone edge. Because Will’s new stone skin is jade, the colour of the mythical saviour of the King of the Goyl. When Will is infected by one of the Goyl, the stone men currently waging war against the human-ruled Austry, and his skin begins to turn to stone, the race is on. And then one day Jacob makes a mistake, and his brother follows him into Mirrorworld. When Jacob discovers the hidden world behind the mirror in their father’s locked study, he disappears for longer and longer periods of time, disregarding his younger brother’s loneliness and his mother’s declining health. Will and Jacob Reckless grew up with an absent father, and a mother unable to cope. I have a lot of feelings, especially about fairy tales and their tropes. But I picked them up because I went to an event with Cornelia Funke, and after hearing her talk about them, I was intrigued. And then I thought way too much about everything that’s going on in this book, and wrote something which probably can’t even be called a review any more. They were based on fairy tales, which I’d read a million times before. I originally thought that the Reckless series wasn’t for me – they were apparently children’s books, which I haven’t been able to get into for years.
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