Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality, (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.
This was the only book I ended up reading on my cruise - and most of it I read on the airplane home from NY. It's not that I didn't have time to read, but every time I tried I ended up falling asleep. Blame it on being medicated for seasickness.
I enjoyed this. Such a clever premise and so fun for book/literature lovers. I can't say that I'd want to live in Jasper Fforde's world, but it would be fun if more people were obsessed with literature. It felt a bit slow, though, which might just be my perception because it took me a whole week of reading a page here and there to finish it. It seemed like it took forever for Jane to get stolen from the novel - the thing I was expecting because it's right there in the summary. But, I thought this novel was very funny at times and ridiculously clever on occasion. There was a lot of language, though. Just putting that warning out there for those of you who may be sensitive to that (lots of "F" words). There are six novels in the Thursday series so far, and I have the second one on hold at the library now. I'm in no rush to buy it, which shows that I liked this book, but I'm not desperate to continue the series quickly. Plus, the first one wraps the plot up very neat and tidy-like. It was a fun read and I definitely recommend it to fans of classic literature. Especially fans of Jane Eyre.
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