10 books like Inkheart

This is a retelling of the classic fairy tale, and it’s a world that I love to disappear into year after year. East challenged me to see beyond the surface of my circumstances and gave a glimpse of the treasure that was only waiting for me to have the eyes to see it. It’s the book that convinced me that the reality of grief wasn’t the end of my family’s story.

A Discovery of Witches is an exciting journey! Deborah Harkness masterfully weaves together history, science, and fantasy to create a captivating story that will keep you guessing until the  end. The book is filled with layers of clues and mysteries that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The characters are well-developed, and the romance between Diana and Matthew is both compelling and heart-wrenching. I couldn't put the book down and I can't wait to dive into the  next installment. This book is a true page-turner, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves a good mystery with a touch of magic!

“Did they all live happily ever after? They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories may say.” This is a book I have read over and over again, and I never tire of it. Unlike the horror books he is well known for, this one was written by Stephen King for his daughter, and it is rooted firmly in a fairy-tale world, featuring a brave prince, his not-so-brave brother, a hunted dragon, and a truly nasty magician. However, King has injected this tale with his own, unique flair for interesting characters and truly gut-churning scenarios, and the story is all the better for it. 

I like the way Goldman plays around with fairy-tale tropes without getting too snarky or satirical. The famous movie adaptation of the book includes the framing device of a grandparent reading to a child.  This may have subliminally affected me, as I imagine parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts reading my books to kids while chuckling to themselves, or tearing up, doing it. There are a lot of books for both adults and kids that are great to read to yourself, but can be tiresome to read aloud. I strive to make mine good for both. 

This narrative-in-verse is based loosely on the story of the Greek monster Geryon, taken from a poem by Stesichorus. Geryon was sexually abused by his older brother. His mother was too weak to protect him. The boy finds comfort in photography and falls into a complicated romance with Herakles. The writing is poetic, experimental, searing, and heartbreaking.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on the migration of visual tropes from traditional Japanese theatre (Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki) into modern art forms (Manga, Anime, Supakabuki/Anime Musicals), which was a rigorous exercise because I couldn’t just compare the tropes—I had to spend hours explaining them to my advisor. It was a fascinating (sometimes exasperating) lesson in learning to read one visual vocabulary, only to have to explain it to someone else in terms that they understood using another.

This blurred-xerox-translation-of-a-translation exercise is the central theme of Mangaman, where a Shojou-esque protagonist falls from a fantastical manga world into a comic. Visual conventions clash, where he walks the wrong way across panels, and where his speed lines accidentally stab people in the school hallway.

A gentler, kinder version of Inkheart and The Untold Tale, this novel is still thrilling. I love the idea of consuming a book as literally as we do figuratively. In this one, our protagonist absentmindedly eats a page out of his favourite bedtime story and wakes up inside it. He has to hop from story to story to get home, crossing through his sister’s horse books and many an adventure before making it safe to his own bed. I think it’s totally charming.

Though not a book, the film starring Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson borrowed heavily from "Niebla" by Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish novel about a character who becomes aware he is being narrated by a writer and goes to visit the writer. This film lives rent-free in my heart because the style of self-awareness that Ferrell’s character experiences in this film is close to the way I conceived of the meta-awareness of the characters Forsyth and Kintyre in The Untold Tale. I love the idea of someone learning they are being puppeteered and breaking free of the expected, the prescribed, and the narrative laid out for them. Maybe that’s why I like the film The Truman Show so much, too.

This book is based on the Grimm’s fairytale, which is only a few brief paragraphs long, but the author brings such a luscious language of storytelling that fills you with a sweet, gentle magic. Princess Ani was born with a word on her tongue and a gift to speak the language of horses. By the very first sentence of this novel, I was captivated. It’s such a beautiful imagining, I lived in this book for days after I finished it. I love it when books can do that to you. 

This novel and the film captured the imagination of millions of readers and then moviegoers. In my local theater I was told that mature women were among the largest group of fans, which may have inspired me to write a fantasy novel. 

Fantasy allows us to include a "possible" world, satisfying dreams we may have had. The courtship of the sixteen-year-old Bella corresponds to the sixteen-year-old Adelyn. Their suitors are also similar, Edward may be eighteen when he became fixed in time, but he is worldly in his experiences which continued to grow as the years passed by. So Adelyn's first love, the proverbial "older man" in Innis Crawford, attracted her, and knew how to court her and fire her imagination.