Parenting & Family Quote by Cornelia Funke

Funke slips a quietly radical idea into a kid-friendly sentence: fantasy doesn’t have to be an escape hatch from the real world; it can be a set of directions. By name-checking Hogwarts and Middle-earth, she nods to the modern canon of “closed” wonderlands - richly imagined, fiercely beloved, and fundamentally inaccessible. Those worlds work partly because they’re sealed behind gates only the chosen (or the reader) can pass. Funke’s pivot is a craft choice and a cultural argument: she wants enchantment that doesn’t end at the back cover.

The intent is practical as much as poetic. Setting a story in a place children can visit turns reading into a kind of tourism of the mind with real coordinates: streets, forests, museums, train stations. It invites kids to treat their own geography as story-ready, to look at a familiar landscape the way fantasy teaches them to look at castles and cursed rings. That’s a subtle democratization of magic. You don’t need a letter delivered by owl; you need curiosity and maybe a bus pass.

The subtext is also about power. Big franchise worlds can make young readers feel like outsiders to wonder, consumers of someone else’s mythology. Funke’s approach hands some authorship back to the child: go there, stand where the characters stood, and the boundary between “reader” and “adventurer” thins. Contextually, it fits a post-Potter generation raised on immersive universes and merch-driven belonging; Funke offers a different kind of immersion, one rooted in lived experience rather than lore.