age: children's
rating: 4/8 tentacles
Ghost Knight is a fun story filled with murderous ghosts, medieval history, and school children sneaking around ancient cathedrals and dark crumbling cemeteries in the dead of night (no pun intended). After behaving badly towards his mother's new boyfriend, Jon Whitcroft is sent off to boarding school, where four ominous ghostly figures call him by his mother's maiden name and threaten his life. His endeavors to escape them lead to a friendship with beautiful Ella, daughter of a local ghost tour guide, and together they work to solve the mystery of the ghosts' determination to hunt Jon.
Some of Cornelia Funke's other works (the Inkheart series, The Thief Lord, and Reckless) have become favorites of mine, but Ghost Knight just didn't measure up. I'm not sure if Funke was targeting a younger age group, but it lacked the complexity of her other works and failed to conjure up a vivid illusion. The story seemed a little hazy, which made it difficult for me to feel as if I was experiencing its unfolding events along with the characters. For example, Jon attends an old cathedral boarding school, but we hardly see any of this part of his life. We watch him sneaking out of his bedroom window at night and we witness brief, ultimately meaningless conversations between Jon and his roommates, but get nothing of life at a boarding school. I think the story needed this scenic backdrop, this context, to anchor it. I suppose there is much more telling than showing.
Funke seems to leap from event to ghostly event with little build up between. Many opportunities to create suspense weren't taken advantage of. We're just told, "Here's this guy and this is what happened to him." There's very little mystery, nothing to keep us wondering. No drama, no build-up, no suspense. We are simply pelted with ghosts.
That's the thing I didn't like about this book. It's a light and entertaining read, but it led me to believe I was getting a ghost story, and I didn't. Ghost Knight was rushed. It was shallow. I never felt like I got to know anyone besides Jon and Funke failed to cultivate that eerie mood where fear creeps around you like a mist and it always seems that someone (or something) is just out of sight, watching and waiting. My favorite thing about ghost stories is the mystery, and Ghost Knight provided very little of this.
