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September 7, 2011 · 3:17 pm

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

So just a quick warning – this is the 2nd Thursday Next book, so if you haven’t read The Eyre Affair (click for my review) this might be a little bit spoiler-y.

Now if you did click above for my review of The Eyre Affair, you’ll see that I gave it 4 stars. In hindsight, I probably should have given it 3 or 3.5 stars. I found the first book a little jarring, and didn’t connect as much with Thursday Next as I could of. I actually liked Hades, the bad guy, the most in the first book.

The second book, Lost in a Good Book, is a big improvement. Thursday and Landen are enjoying their newlywed status, and Thursday is still attracting a bit of fame due to her adventures in Jane Eyre and defeating Hades. But stuff quickly goes to crap when the Goliath Corporation makes Landen disappear to blackmail her, and she’s literally almost killed by coincidences. Thursday ends up joining the Jurisfiction team – the police force inside of books and learning to navigate the literary world. While trying to save Landen, she’s diving in and out of different books, trying to authenticate a newly resurfaced Shakespeare play, and trying to save the world from being overcome by a mysterious pink goo.

I found this book way easier to get into – maybe because I knew what to expect, having read the first book. The story starts right away, and you get to spend a lot more time with Thursday as she learns how to book-jump and meets various different literary characters. I love how the whole idea of book-jumping is explored much more thoroughly, and the other cool peeks we get into this alternative-reality 1980′s Britain. Wooly mammoths are alive and migrating around, Neanderthals are back and treated like animals, people travel via a tube running through the center of the Earth - it’s all very cool. My only disappointment is that we don’t see much of her partner Bowden, who I really liked in the first book.

On top of all that, this book ends like a sequel and makes me want to hurry and try to read the next book, The Well of Lost Plots, sooner rather than later. The first book ended like it could have been a stand-alone novel – this book ends on the brink of the next adventure for Thursday, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how her journey goes.

Sarah Says: 4.5 stars

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Filed under 5-star, British, Contemp. Lit, Fiction, Sci-Fi

Tagged as book jumping, dodos, Goliath Corporation, Jasper Fforde, Lost in A Good Book, Thursday Next, wooly mammoths

April 21, 2011 · 10:53 pm

>The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

OK, my feelings about this book are a bit mixed up but overall positive. Let’s start with what it’s about.

The novel takes place in 1985-ish Britain, but a bit quirky – time travel just kind of happens, cloned pets are all the rage, and literature is a SERIOUS thing. Like, people will fight over who was the real Shakespeare, and there’s a whole SpecOps field for protecting the sanctity of the written word – Thursday Next is one such Literary Detective. When people start disappearing into books and characters in major classics start going missing, Thursday is the girl to call. But she’ll have to face a serious big-time baddie to save the day.

So, overall an awesome premise and I found the whole world created pretty fascinating. I loved reading about how different things were. And Thursday herself is a pretty cool gal. She’s tough, although a little damaged from her time as a soldier. And then there was my favorite character – Hades. Acheron Hades is the big bad guy, and I LOVED him. I know, I know – I’m generally not supposed to like the villain. But I loved his intellect, sharp humor, and just general psychopath-ness.

Now, I have two kind of small complaints. One is that this is all uber-British, which is fine. I like England. However, since I’m not British, I found that a whole lot of things just went right over my head. I didn’t get a lot of little jokes that I feel like I should have gotten. There’s an online reference guide somewhere for that stuff, but I wasn’t always near the computer while reading so I kind of had to just gloss over the wacky British things I didn’t get.

My other small complaint is that the title, and the blurb on the back of the book, lead most to think that majority of this book concerns the fact that Jane Eyre goes missing from that famous Charlotte Bronte novel. But it actually kind of took a long time to get to that, so I was mildly disappointed by that. I’d be more disappointed if I was actually a fan of Jane Eyre, but I’m not. That kind of worked in my favor here.

Anyhoo, this was a fun, different novel with equally fun and different characters. Also, some of these characters just have the BEST names. I won’t type them here, cause you should go read it and find out for yourself. So go give it a try. I’ll be picking up the sequels eventually.

Sarah Says: 4 stars