Sometimes stories are wonderful. Sometimes they are good. And sometimes you end up with something of a mixed review. This and the following are mixed reviews.
Cornelia Funke has been called “the German J.K. Rowling.” The Thief Lord, one of her bestselling novels, follows the story of Bo and Prosper, two brothers who run away from their scheming aunt to Venice. There, they meet up with the Thief Lord (an Italian version of Dickens’ Artful Dodger) who invites them to join his gang of thieves. Their aunt pursues them to Venice, a hired detective starts to follow them, a mysterious old man asks the Thief Lord to steal a strange object, and all this takes place against the exotic backdrop of Venice’s famous maze of canals and cathedrals.
Sounds exciting, no? Well, I hate to say it, but something must have gotten lost in the translation, because for the first half of the book, I could scarcely make myself read anymore, I just found it so boring. The characters did not seem realistic. Even though we have a gang of kid thieves sneaking around Venice, the plot dragged and it felt like nothing was happening. It wasn’t until the second half of the book that things started to pick up and the story gained some traction. Then, the mysterious stolen object turns out to be something quite magical. In the end, the story turned out better than I thought it would, but was still rather less than I had hoped it would be.
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