Guest Post + Giveaway - Cornelia Funke

I am very please to have Cornelia here at Books for Company. I absolutely love this guest post! Thank you Cornelia!

I have Reckless on my shelf waiting to be read and l can not wait.

LOVE IN ALL ITS GUISES

Reckless is a taut and darkly romantic modern fairytale written by Cornelia Funke in collaboration with the highly acclaimed film writer and producer Lionel Wigram.

Here Cornelia Funke gives us the low down on ‘love’ in Reckless, and how it felt to write collaboratively with a man on the subject of love and romance…

In the Ink books the most dominant ‘love’ theme is the love between father and daughter and – with Dustfinger and Farid – between father and son. There are hints at romantic love – Resa and Mo; Meggie and Farid; Dustfinger and Roxane – but only in Reckless did I make romantic love a dominant theme.  Of course I did! After all, the Mirrorworld is a world of ‘Once Upon a Time’ and ‘Happily Ever After’. What else are fairy tales about but finding the prince or the princess, or falling in love with a fairy?

I did not want to present love the way the Grimm Brothers so often showed it: as something the woman is waiting for patiently – and very passively. I was more interested in the versions I found in older folk tales where the female heroines are often forces of nature… goddesses, even. I tried to show, with the Dark Fairy, what love can do, even – perhaps especially – to strong women. With Fox I showed unrequited love; and in Fox I found a character that expresses my belief that women tend to be much closer to nature than men (who often try to fight and dominate it).

I have met women like Clara, who come from our modern world and suddenly find the man they love to be a stranger. I have met women like the Empress, who rule over men by playing their games according to their own rules. I have found myself in all of these characters – and have loved in the same way they have loved – both as a girl, and as the 52 year-old woman I am now.

Of course, it was also especially interesting to explore the theme of love in Reckless because it was the first time I had worked with a man on a story. Lionel Wigram and I had endless and very controversial discussions about how men and women love: how do they love differently? How are they the same? Can you be in love with two people at the same time? Is Fox really a woman or is she more like a child to Jacob? Does he love his brother’s girlfriend or is it just lust, induced by the Larkswater?

We are now deep into book two, and we still haven’t found all the answers. But I think we both learned a lot through our conversations and through our story about how differently women and men experience love; how they approach it, live with it, weigh it in their lives. I hope our story is a mirror of the countless hours we spent in my writing house finding inspiration in each other’s views and experiences and feeding our characters and our book with them.

Find Cornelia -

Amazon (UK/USA)

Goodreads

Website

 -Giveaway-

Win a paperback copy of Cornelia's latest book, Reckless.

With a big thanks to Chicken House!!

Rules

UK Only 

(Sorry International people)

No requirements

Ends 8th July

How to enter

Leave a comment for Cornelia about the interview or her books with your email address.

No email address, no entry.