Cornelia Funke, who started her international career as a youth book author in California in 2006 with the “Inkworld” trilogy and the “Spiegelwelt” series, has now written a continuation of her successful Drachenreiter “series.” The Curse of Aurelia “became the farewell present for her friends in Malibu, as she returned to Europe this year and now lives in Tuscany.
It is the story of a fight over a giant jellyfish – the ancient guardian of magical creatures – and it is set on the beach and in the sea off Malibu. “I’m like a sponge,” Funke once explains her writing. “I inhale a place. After that I work a lot with literature and photos”. As in the two volumes of the “Drachenreiter” stories, unscrupulous people try to exterminate magical beings with technical helpers. They are defeated by Barnabas Wiesengrund, his children Ben, the dragon rider, and their daughter Guinever.
This time it is the world in the sea in which the magical creatures join forces with humans and their animal and fantastic helpers to fight
“May we hurt other living beings out of greed”, the author in “The Curse of Aurelia” has Barnabas ask. “Can we accept the pain and despair of other creatures so that we can enrich ourselves or have a more comfortable life? No! Not even for more knowledge.” And that’s why he will fight the unscrupulous Cadoc Eelstrom – “a deadly parasite that feeds on the life and magic of others” who wants to catch Aurelia, the gigantic magical being that has lived in the depths of the ocean since the formation of the earth. Because this jellyfish, which appears every three to four thousand years when the earth is in danger, transports new magical beings in its seed pods, from which Aalstrom expects eternal life.
So this time it is the world in the sea in which the magical creatures join forces with humans and their animal and fantastic helpers to fight. The author found some of them in Nordic myths, such as Kelpie, the water horses, or Selkie, the seal people, they live in the story together with water creatures (they are listed in the appendix), which came from the author’s imagination.
The plot, in which of course the main characters of the previous volumes also play a major role, lives from wildly rampant scenes with surprising dialogues, in which the appearances are so lively and idiosyncratic that the people and the magical beings are not black and white -Follow the scheme. Especially when Cornelia Funke shows her favorite characters, such as the young she-rat Lola Grauschwanz, a daring aviator and detective, or the fearful homunculus flybone. So that the magic is really saved and Ben and his sister Guineva can go their own way, they need the help of a special woman who lives in the mountains of Malibu. Did the author leave her alter ego here in California? (from 10 years)
Cornelia Funke: Dragon Rider. The curse of Aurelia. Translated from the English by Tobias Schnettler. With illustrations by the author. Dressler, 2021. 428 pages, 20 euros.