“If you’re looking for happily ever after, you’ve come to the wrong place,” the book flap warned.
I like happy endings, but I read the book anyway.
“And I fell in love with your writing all over again,” I wrote about Reckless in a letter to the author, Cornelia Funke, international bestselling and award-winning author.
When I discover a book I love, I go to the section in the library where all the books by that author are and methodically read through every book they have until I have either read them all or grown tired of their writing. Somehow, though, I missed Reckless when I scoured the library shelves for books by Funke in middle school after I devoured Inkheart. I honestly do not know how I missed it; the English edition was released in 2010, but I did not discover it until nine years later. I found Reckless by coincidence during my freshman year in college.
I do not normally write letters to authors. The one I wrote to Funke is the only one I have ever sent. I also do not normally re-read books, but in one year, I read Reckless three times. And while on the topic of things I do not normally do, I also typically try to avoid starting on a series that is not finished yet. After waiting in agony for a series to come out book by book when I was 11, I decided to never start an unfinished series again, but I unwittingly broke that resolve with Reckless. (In my defense, I thought Reckless was a stand-alone book when I started it. Then I thought it was just a trilogy. It was not until after I finished the third book that I realized that it is not a trilogy; it is just that there are only three published books so far.)
Jacob Reckless, originally from our world, is an expert treasure hunter in Mirrorworld, a dark fairy-tale world that he discovered. He is hunting for a cure to the stone infection that is growing in Will, his younger brother. In his favor, Jacob has the help of his trusty sidekick Fox (a shapeshifting girl that Jacob cares more for than he admits) and Clara (a girl also from our world who loved Will enough to follow him into the dangerous Mirrorworld.) If they fail, his brother will become one of the stone Goyls that the Austry Empire is warring against. The only problem is that everyone knows there is no cure. He will become a monster, and a shadow of who he once was. It is a hopeless quest, but Jacob is willing to risk anything to save his brother. No price is too high for Jacob, and believe me, if there is a cure, the cost most certainly will be dear.
Funke describes the Mirrorworld as being a place where “the darkest fairytales come alive.” It is a dangerous world filled with more things that could kill you than bring you life (Will’s impending transformation into a Goyl is a prime example.) Although her world is a fantasy one filled with fantastic creatures, people and objects, the darkness that she describes in her world that feels familiar.
If you watch too much news filled with stories about how our world is filled with death, injustice and destruction, you might begin to believe that our world does not have many happy endings either. Sometimes it feels like there are more things that wreak havoc than inspire hope.
Despite the gloom in Funke’s fantasy world, Reckless is not a story about how broken our world is. It is a story about hope in the darkness, about the sacrifices people are willing to make for brothers, friends and those they love. The deeper the darkness is, the brighter the light is. That is just as true in our world as it is in Mirrorworld.
As I read Reckless for the first time (and the second and third times), I saw the Mirrorworld through Jacob’s eyes, painted in such beautiful prose by Funke. I fell in love with that world, just as Jacob did. You may or may not find happily ever after in Reckless (no one that I know of knows how the series will end at this point,) but if you are looking for a raw, beautiful and honest story about hope, you’ve definitely come to the right place.