Cornelia Funke's MIRRORWORLD series, LIVING SHADOWS: second of 5-book illustrated YA Dark Fantasies

RECKLESS: Living Shadows (MirrorWorld #2)
CORNELIA FUNKE (tr. Oliver Latsch)
Pushkin Children's Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jacob has saved his brother from the Mirrorworld, but now he will pay a terrible price. A fairy's curse is burning in his heart, and to break the spell he must embark upon a perilous journey - with his trusty friend Fox by his side - to seek out the only treasure that could save him.

Jacob's search for the golden crossbow will lead him across hundreds of miles by land and sea, to an invisible, enchanted palace within the Dead City. It will bring him face to face with vicious beasts, bloodthirsty giants, and a deadly stone­faced rival.

It will test his courage like never before.

Living Shadows is the second book in the thrilling Reckless series.

First book reviewed here—Second book reviewed here
—Third book reviewed here—Fourth book reviewed here

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am convinced that this series is cruelly aimed at obsessive completist readers. The cliffhanger at the end of book one makes this book a MUST-READ NOW and, through the magic of Kindle, I was able to read the books back-to-back. I warn all who come after me: To sign up for this voyage into Mirrorworld is to commit to the whole cycle.

I am in.

What happens during the course of this book is that Jacob comes to understand something he'd never given much thought to: My love for you creates my responsibility for you creates a web of obligation that is endless...and as addictive as any narcotic. While we who have read the first book know what a price Jacob has paid, in fact what a price he paid after making a sacrifice that even he isn't quite aware of the dimensions of yet, we're probably not expecting the antagonist of this book.

In fact, I guarantee we're unprepared for the existence of the antagonist of this book. And that's probably Author Funke's most clever sleeve-ace yet. It plays well.

There are the accustomed delights of reading this series' world-building fillips. These are numerous, though enumerating them for you isn't really something worth doing in a review. There is a Fandom wiki, of course there is!, and I didn't look but am willing to bet there's fanfic on AO3. The reason is that Author Funke used every conceivable fairy-tale source to draw her world out from and has made it into a near-seamless whole. (Where there are seams that I can perceive, eg Goyls' method of transmission, it felt to me as though they were intentional not born of inattention to source material.)

The problem I had wth this entry is how kinetic, nay frenetic, it is. We go from pillar to post and back again; Fox is with us, Nerron the treasure-hunting half-Goyl whose existence is new to this book is against us; we're never for a moment at rest, able to take stock, pause to reflect. It's exactly what Author Funke intends, and it's a valid narrative technique but in this reader it creates a sense of distance from the characters. I'm so deep in the world that I don't get to experience his progress through his (final?) days.

Until I read this:

"If you catch your own children in the circle...then you can use the years you take from them for yourself. You're just taking back the life you gave them in the first place. The more of it, the better."

That was a gut-punch of a trap set for overeager treasure hunters, wasn't it?! And the sheer violence of the stakes set...if you're not a relative of the curse-setter, you're still going to die in the circle but it won't keep the curse-setter alive...could not be more urgent. Now that Jacob has found this evil place, he thinks he's trapped in the curse.

Fox, his shifter gal-pal, isn't having that. As always, the woman's love saves the man from his stupidity and greed. Though let's be fair to Author Funke, this time Jacob's greed was simply the desire to live that we all suffer from. And since Fox very much wants Jacob still alive, she's hardly just going to watch as he dies from a curse she can stop from progressing...if she's willing to do something that's very, very hard to do and commit murder.

Killing someone/thing in a struggle isn't murder. The intent to kill, the set purpose and the planning of the act...that's murder. Will she murder to save Jacob's life?

You'll have to read the book.

The ending is tremendously exciting.