Cornelia Funke on Her Latest Novel, 'Reckless'
RSSBy SLJ Staff
| Cornelia Funke's Reckless hits book stores on September 14. |
Funke, a guest speaker at SLJ's Day of Dialog in New York on May 25, said Reckless marks the first time she's written and illustrated a book. "It was complete bliss to get the two professions together," she told a room packed with librarians, educators, and publishers.
The story is about Jacob Reckless, who escapes to another world behind a mirror, where witches haunt the forests and fairies and dwarfs roam. It's also a world locked in a deadly war. Jacob's secret is safe until one day his younger brother, Will, follows him-with disastrous consequences. The brothers are forced to race against time to find reverse a curse before one of them is lost forever.
Movie producer Lionel Wigram, Funke's friend and creative companion on the novel, "found the door to this story" and helped with the plot. "[He] often knew more about it than I did," the author wrote in the book's acknowledgement. But Funke did all the writing.
Funke says she learned from her "Inkheart" series that children's books don't need children heroes. That's why in Reckless Jacob ages from 12 in the first chapter to 23 in the second, she explains.
"Jacob Reckless is by far the most ruthless hero I ever came up with," Funke says, explaining that it was such pleasure writing about him that it took three years to complete. "It's a world you can enter and want to get lost in it for years and years. I would feel guilty talking on the phone to a friend and not finishing a chapter."
An initial attempt to write the book in English was "terrible," Funke says. So it was written in German and then translated.
"I normally rewrite a book five times at least before I can present it to the world," she adds.
Funke wrote her first book at 28-but she didn't always know she'd end up as a writer. "For me, it took a crooked way," first as a social worker because she always wanted to work with children. After a post-graduate course in book illustration at the Hamburg State College of Design, she worked as a designer of board games and as an illustrator of children's books
"Then all that came together one night," Funke remembers, when she received a story from a publisher who wanted the German native to illustrate dragons and sea maids. The assignment inspired her to write her own stories for young readers.
"How do you find out what you are born to do?" Funke asked about her ultimate career path. "I had more patience for the writing. If I put a sentence in front of me and I don't think it's perfect, I will try for a week to make it perfect."
