It took Tammi and me quite a while to figure out what kind of book this should be.
We became friends and decided to make a book together that would inspire the readers to take a closer look at Green Kingdom and to maybe make some of them fall in love with plants. I loved the way Tammi wrote about plants and she came to visit me. It all began when I read a book by Tammi Hartung, an ethno botanist and herb farmer from Colorado.
This has been a very unusual book to work on for many reasons. But I’m not quite as excited anymore as I was when I read it the first time.Will be published in Germany in April 2023. I’m certainly still curious and willing to finish out the trilogy this time round, the book was definitely good enough for that. I did like his complicated relationship with Dustfinger, though. This really rubbed me the wrong way, as it seems to posit that Arabic culture is a culture of villains. Not because of Farid himself, but because his misogyny is commented on a couple of times in a way of “well, coming from an Arab culture, what can you expect”, while Capricorn’s misogyny is never a cultural thing, but a villain thing. Meggie and Mo are nice, too, and are definitely not perfect, but compared to those three, they feel too smooth. They all have traits that are usually reviled, and still, the three were my favorite characters in the book. Funke has a way of making deeply-flawed characters that are quite abrasive, and still make you care for them – be it Dustfinger, Elinor or Fenoglio. That being said, it is worth pushing yourself through the book for the great concept and the really fantastic characters. I am not sure why that is, there should be enough exciting turns in to fill 500 pages with ease, but the pacing just isn’t right. I mean, it is a long book to start with – over 500 pages, and in not-too-big print – but it also takes a bit of work to get through it, as you have to propel yourself forward more than the book pulls you along. I suspect the reason that I never read the third book is that Tintenherz drags a bit.
(Keep your fingers crossed for me that this won’t become a pattern.) But given how long it has been, I had better start with the first novel again. I read Tintenherz more than 10 years ago, and then I read the second novel in the trilogy, but for some reason, I never read the third – and I figured, I’d finally do that.
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