Author: Jasper Fforde
Why I Read It: Because I LOVE Jasper Fforde. I found the Thursday Next series abandoned at the thrift store and I scooped them all up. This is book one.
First Line: "My father had a face that could stop a clock."
First Impression: How delightfully playful!
Last Impression: I had a pretty good idea how this book would end, but I very much enjoyed getting there.
Ratings
Overall - 5 Heart Racing Delightfully engaging and addictively playful.
Characters - 5 Each character is fun and believable with quirks that bring them to life.
Story - 5 The story is unsurpassed in playful creativity; how many of us would have loved to transcend reality and find ourselves within the pages of our favorite books? Not only do these characters have the opportunity to do so, they get to see the jet-flying, tourist-planning secret side of classic Bronte and Austen novels.
Narration - 5 I haven't fallen in love with narration like this since I first read Douglas Adams (the ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't). It's quick and witting and a delight to read.
Read Again? Absolutely! This is joining my "Favorites" shelf. I will probably read this at least two more times.
Tell Others To Read? Yes and Yes. Fforde crafts alternate realities with such care and depth you truly are transported away. The Thursday Next adventure is no different.
Excerpt: "I was what we called an 'operative grade I' for SO-27, the Literary Detective Division of the Special Operations Network based in London. It's way less flash than it sounds. Since 1980 the big criminal gangs had moved in on the lucrative literary market and we had much to do and few funds to do it with. I worked under Area Chief Boswell, a small, puffy man who looked like a bag of flour with arms and legs. He lived and breathed the job; words were his life and his love - he never seems happier than when he was on the trail of a counterfeit Coleridge or a fake Fielding. It was under Boswell that we arrested the gang who were stealing and selling Samuel Johnson first editions; on another occasion we uncovered an attempt to authenticate a flagrantly unrealistic version of Shakespeare's lost work Cardenio. Fun while it lasted, but only small islands of excitement among the ocean of day-to-day mundanities that is SO-27: We spent most of our time dealing with illegal traders, copyright infringements and fraud.
I had been with Boswell and SO-27 for eight years, living in a Maida Vale apartment with Pickwick, a regenerated pet dodo left over from the days when reverse extinction was all the rage and you could buy home cloning kits over the counter. I was keen - no, I was desperate - to get away from the LiteraTecs but transfers were unheard of and promotion a nonstarter.
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