The “why can these people do it and no one else” bugged me too, and that can’t be blamed on translation. I’m hoping, perhaps vainly, that it’s explained in the sequel. It’s funny — I would have been completely fine with its having no explanation if Mo was the only person in the whole world who could do it. But once she introduced Darius… well, now it’s a thing *people* can do, which my suspension of disbelief doesn’t handle as well.

(And of course, as I said in a previous comment, there was no reason for Darius to exist anyway.)

As for mom showing up, you knew she had to, didn’t you? It was just a question of how, and I was actually surprised about who she turned out to be. This is probably because I’m notoriously dumb about plot twists, but still.

Nope, because I would prefer that you check it out of a library or buy it from your local independent bookstore, of course! :)

Disagreement is not allowed — get off my comments page!

Seriously, I hear you on some of the writing issues — more the sometimes-flat characterization than the description, which I found lovely and vivid — but I’m going to blame them at least partly on the translation. The Thief Lord was translated by someone else, and I don’t remember seeing the seams in that translation as much. (Dear Anthea Bell, I’m pretty sure that native English speakers — even non-American ones — don’t say “What’s the [big] idea?” nearly as often as you seem to think they do.) Unfortunately, my German isn’t fluent enough to read it in the original and compare.

SPOILERS BELOW!

What bugged you about the plot? (I think we’re far enough down the comments page that you can post spoilers, so long as you write “Spoilers” in bold at the top.) The only thing that jumped out at me was it made no sense for Darius (the other reader who wasn’t as good at it) to exist, except to create a reason for Resa to be mute — and that could have been accomplished to greater effect by having Capricorn cut out her tongue, which is what I first thought had happened anyway. Am I being naive and missing other stuff?

Dustfinger was also my favorite character — he was the most tortured and had the most shades of grey, so of course I loved him!

So I had heard, but I didn’t realize it was that far along. Andy Serkis and Helen Mirren — yay! According to IMDB, Brendan Fraser was Cornelia Funke’s first choice for Mo. I probably would have picked someone more… British. But I do heart Brendan Fraser, and I can see him being a good choice. Man, I hope the movie doesn’t suck…