The Thief Lord - Cornelia Funke

I was looking for Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and some Alan Garner books* in the children's library yesterday when I spotted Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord and I remembered that at least two people had mentioned it to me when I was talking about reading Inkheart a couple of weeks ago, so I picked it up. And I confess I found it far more digestible and hard to put down than I did Inkheart. Two orphaned boys are hiding out in Venice, having run away from their aunt who wants to send 12 year old Prosper away to a boarding school, and to take custody of 5 year old Boniface (Bo to everyone). At the start of the tale the two boys have travelled from their grandfather's home in Hamburg to Venice, the magical city about which they heard so much from their mother who died 3 months previously. When they arrived in Venice they were befriended by a gang of 4 children: Riccio, who is a pickpocket; Mosca, who loves boats; Hornet, who loves books and whose real name is Caterina; and Scipio, who is the eponymous Thief Lord. Unfortunately for Prosper and Bo, their Aunt Esther has tracked them down to Venice and she employs a tortoise-loving detective named Victor Getz to locate them. Fortunately Victor is too sympathetic towards the boys to be a villain, and he gets entangled in the adventures of the gang, and ends up helping Bo and Prosper instead of handing them over to Esther and her horrible husband.

This is a great book - another one for my wish list - and I recommend it far more strongly that I did Inkheart.

* I eventually found a copy of 'Charlie' with illustrations by the excellent Quentin Blake (whose work I always recognise instantly, even at a distance !), and Alan Garner's Elidor, but everything else of Garner's seems to be out on loan from the Central Library (or else hadn't been registered with the OPAC as being back since they were having trouble with the OPAC both Friday and Saturday). I'll have to try again on Tuesday when I'm taking books (and Sense and Sensibility) back to the library.

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There's a spoilerish review of The Thief Lord over on the Scholar's Blog Spoiler Zone.