The Magic of Venice and ‘The Thief Lord’
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Tag: Young Adult Books
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When I first read Cornelia Funke's 
I dragged my backpack out of the train and left the station. It was a warm, gray day. The clouds hung low and lazy just above my head. The ocean, despite the canal’s best efforts to contain it, was everywhere. The smell hung in the air, even, as I would soon find, inside of my hotel room. I stepped out onto a wooden dock and climbed aboard one of the many boat taxis. The driver’s warm eyes met mine. His weathered skin was glowing with a tan and he didn’t mind when I asked him to take me the long way around.
The canals are the veins of this city, pulsing along, slowly pushing daily life from one place to the other. We began to glide down one of the narrow waterways as I watched green moss climb out of the sea and up the walls of stranger’s homes. The slat air ate away at paint and the faces of statues, leaving me with a feeling that unseen forces had been at work here. It was impossible not to think of my old friends Bo, Prosper, and the other orphans in Star Palace. I could see them now, lounging about behind moth eaten curtains, sorting out their stolen treasures among the crumbling stone.
In a word Venice is - enchanting. It will make you lost. There are echoes of plates and cups clanking, the constant lapping of waves up against boat bottoms. Seagulls fly in and call to their friends while rain begins to drip from above. At the whim of the tides the ancient city rises and falls as if it’s breathing. Old palaces, like gray skeletons with their toes in the water, lean whichever way they please. They have grown so elegantly tired. Narrow passages wind their way in circles and dead ends. The locals and their ghosts chuckle from around corners. Time here is a game, exposing the city’s secrets before they are slowly swallowed up again.
I kept looking over my shoulder, always catching something just out of the corner of my eye. It could have been The Thief Lord himself disappearing down a footpath or Victor Getz watching from a bridge as I passed beneath him. On my first evening in Venice, while the end of summer sun began its dip to meet the horizon, the city had already convinced me to suspend my disbelief. There is such a thing as magic. It lives here.