EVEN IF BOOKS ARE your drug of choice, a book about books can be very annoying. The last thing we want to be reminded of when deep in a story is that it is a story, conjured out of words.

Yet the best kind of magical tale shares this knowledge implicitly, with wizards and witches able to command special powers through the use of the right words. It seems extraordinary, therefore, that nobody before Cornelia Funke came up with the idea that a gifted child could, by reading, transform the fictional into something real.

That is what happened in Inkheart. Mo, a gentle bookbinder, is heartbroken because his voice has sent his wife, Resa, into the world of the story, leaving his daughter Meggie motherless. Despite the attempts of a band of murderous villains from Inkworld, they finally got Resa back, voiceless but happy.

“Stories always go on,” Mo warns Meggie. “They don’t end on the last page any more than they begin on the first page.”

Funke claims that she did not plan a sequel to Inkheart, but the whopping 675 pages of Inkspell now form the second part of a trilogy. Dustfinger, the scar-faced fire-eater exiled from his world into ours, finds a way back, and is swiftly followed by Farid, the boy from the Thousand and One Nights, and Meggie, who is in love with Farid. They are followed by Mo and Resa. Now, in a magical world of ghosts, fairies, white women and fires, the story leaps into life as much more than an homage to the type of children’s book that Funke adores.

Fenoglio, the “author” who disappeared into his own story at the end of Inkheart, keeps finding that his tale has taken a turn for the worse, with good people dying and bad ones gaining increasing power. Meggie’s reading powers must not only save her father from a mortal bullet wound but bring back Cosimo the Fair from the dead to fight the evil Adderhead.

Not only does Fenoglio go through agonies to find exactly the right words, but events conspire to leave some of them unspoken. Having used Mo’s physical characteristics to create the mysterious hero Bluejay, he finds to his horror that Mo is about to be executed as the Adderhead’s enemy.

Yes, there are worse things than the British libel laws in this world, where hypnotic beauties are underscored by gorgeous terrors — and another “diabolical storyteller” bent on giving Fenoglio’s original tale new twists and turns. You can sense that Funke is enjoying herself hugely in what has, against expectations, become her best work to date.

There are many other characteristics which make her remarkable. One is her feeling that adults and children are in an adventure together. I particularly love the relationship between Mo and Meggie, for if the bond between mothers and daughters or fathers and sons is frequently explored, that between fathers and daughters is seen more rarely.

Inkspell isn’t a book to recommend to every child. It is a novel of complex ideas, for a reader already in love with literature. But to those for whom a good children’s book is the greatest pleasure imaginable, this is the perfect gift.

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