Reviewed by Mrs. Foley
From library catalog - Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection in a time-altered Great Britain in which messing with the classics is a punishable offense, sets out to find out who drowned her husband of a month thirty-eight years ago while interacting with classic literature.

I just love Jasper Fforde's books. You really have to be able to let go of reality as you will be traveling in and out of books and living in a world were dodos and neanderthals have been reactualized. But the literary references he makes and the way he parodies government, etc. are just wonderful. Read "The Eyre Affair" first and then the entire series if you want! ( )

Such an imagination! Where do authors find their ideas!! Probably in The Well of Lost Plots ( )

-

There's a trial in Kafka's "Trial" (this chapter made my head spin so much I had to read it three times and then accept it would always baffle me; Franz would have been proud), a Miss Havisham so real she hops off the page and beats you with her stick for blaspheming (I don't dare read "Great Expectations" now; I'm actually afraid Dickens's potrait of her won't do justice to Jasper Fforde's...!), a loveable Cheshire Cat-turned librarian, the greatest Shakespeare discovery in the history of history, an all-too-realistic contemporary art exibition, plus more of everything you will have loved from the first book: Thursday's delightful time-travelling dad, her adorable dodo, her complicated love life; not to mention pure evil, alive and not, human and not.

This sent me scouting various Waterstone's for "The Well of Lost Plots" - which leads me to a gripe: why do clever, funny, precious authors like Jasper Fforde get so little shelf-space dedicated to them when, of all the entertaining (but not really of any aesthetic value) chick-lit of Katie Fforde, not a single title is missing? Books like this should be thrown at people's heads just so they come across them, not hidden like something to be ashamed of!

One minor note: do not try to start from here. Jasper Fforde's magical world is by this point far too developed for it to make much sense: this is not a series of stand-alone books, it is a continuous story that needs reading in the order it's been written... unless you want to end up very confused, and unable to understand what all the hype is about. Which would be a shame, because for once it is a highly justified hype. ( )

Mr Fforde once again creates an alternate world which, except for the guns and Goliath, sounds quite enticing. A world all about books? How awesome.

We meet up again with Thursday shortly after the conclusion to The Eyre Affair, everything seems to be going well. Enter a lost Shakespeare play, the Goliath Corporation and a brooding dodo, amongst other things. This is smart, laugh out loud fiction for literary lovers. ( )