In september of 2014 Kai Meyer, a famous German author, published a new book: »Die Seiten der Welt«. Unfortunately it hasn't been translated to English yet, so for now we will call it »Pages of the World«, but we are not sure if this will be the title of the English edition.
The book is about a girl named Furia Salamandra Faerfax, who has got a special bond to books and therefore can perform magic with books.
»While she went down the steps to the library
Furia could already smell the tales:
the best scent of the world.«
»New books smelled of printing ink,
of glue and of expectations.
Old books scented of adventurers,
of there own ones and of the ones they told about.
And good books gave off an aroma
in which all of this was
and with it a soupçon of magic.«
»To like each other means to discover
that you speak the same tongue.
To love each other means to verse
in the same language.«
Furia, her father and litte brother live together with a cook, a butler and a driver isolated at an estate near London. Furia's father is a book magician which means that he can use a book to do nearly everything, for example travelling to other places or making himself invisible. One day, Furia will be able to do that too, but only if she finds 'her' special book, which is her »Soulbook«. Every book magician has to find his Soulbook to become really powerful. Furia can't await that day because then she will be able to accompany her father on his secret missions. He thinks that the World of Literature is in danger because of the » »Empty Books« which were written by Siebenstern, one of their ancestors. Due to him, Furias family has to hide from the other book magicians. But one day, the family house is attacked and Furia has to escape. She flees to »Libropolis«, the hidden city of the book magicians, whose entrance is in London. There she finds friends who support and help her finding her brother who was captured by the invaders. Together they have to pass many adventures; they are hunted by evil book magicians and a mysterious agent. And if that wasn't enough they have to cope with the rebellion of the »Exlibris«, who are book characters that accidentally came out of their books and now have to live in the real world where they are treated very badly. They have to live in ghettos, the ugly and dangerous quarters of Libropolis. Headed by the two agitators Ariel and Puck (two characters from Shakespeare's works) they want to end their oppression and Furia begins to question the regime of the book magicians.
We both think that Furia is a very adorable and clever girl who would do everything to save her family. We love her powers and totally want to have them too. Wouldn't it be cool to perform magic with books and to hang around with the Exlibris? Personally, we can't understand the book magicians who subdue them and we are totally against this cruelty. It would be amazing to meet the characters of our favorite books and we would rather worship them than to treat them like criminals. In addition, the Exlibris have no chance to go back into their stories, therefore they already have to suffer a lot. Besides that, Kai Meyer created a wonderful that will fascinate every lover of books!
We would definitely buy the book again, also because of the design. The cover is very mysterious and beautiful, it even won an award for the best book cover in 2014. In addition to that you'll get a bookmark which is important in the story because it is the entrance card to Libropolis. Therefore we still dream of going there one day.
Well, we live in London. Let's go looking for Libropolis! ~Gwen
I'm sure we'll get in there with our bookmarks! ~Liv
Oh, we nearly forgot to tell you; just in case you were wondering about the quotes. We translated them from German to English as close to the original text as possible because we wanted to give you an impression of the style and there are no English quotes yet. We did the same thing in our last post which was about »Die Buchspringer«. If you are interested in stories about magical books you should definitely read it!
source: Goodreads