First Among Sequels

It’s been 14 years since the events of the previous book, and Thursday Next has retired from Special Operations work and is now a carpet installer. Just kidding! The carpet installation business is just a cover for her unofficial SpecOps duties, which itself is a cover for her ongoing role at Jurisfiction, the police agency inside fictional books. She’s training two new prospective agents - Thursday Next 1-4, the abrasive and trigger-happy protagonist of the first 4 books in her series, and Thursday Next 5, the hippy-dippy and touchy-feely protagonist of book 5, The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco (no longer available). In the real world, she has a writer’s-blocked husband, two daughters, and a 16-year-old son who is supposed to invent show more time travel and found the ChronoGuard, but he doesn’t want to get out of bed.

Another classic. The time jump really serves the story here, making everything feel fresh and new, while Friday’s storyline means nothing can go back to the way it was before (pun intended).. The trigger-happiness of early books Thursday was something I really noticed on this reread and it’s so refreshing to have it addressed directly by the author. Thursday as a mom feels natural; she’s just as witty and hypercompetent as ever. We get a lot more lore about BookWorld than you would expect from a book this late in the series as Thursday explains to the other Thursdays how everything works and how the books exist in relation to each other. If you’ve read them before you’ll know why this becomes important later. show less

In this installment of Thursday Next, we find Thursday living the charmed life of a carpet installer, while her stay-at-home husband dotes on the children and works on his novel. Naturally, this is purely a front, as Thursday is still working and Spec Ops in Jurisfiction and is also running illegal cheese across the border in her free time.

Although her double life is forcing her to lie to Landen, she plans to tell him any day, it's just that there never seems to be a good time. And anyhow, between the dangerously high national stupidity surplus and the fast approaching end of time, it's very possible matters will reach a singularity before this particular revelation is forced.

To make matters more irritating, Thursday is being tasked show more with training herself at Jurisfiction, that is Thursday5, the written version of herself from the most recent novelization of her life. Unfortunately, Thursday5's character was poorly written as a New Age sop and is frankly terrible at everything and possibly not capable of improving. But what's really got the Book World in a tizzy is the dwindling read rates which might very shortly result in literacy extinction.

And then there's Friday, Thursday's son who shows no interest in joining the Chronoguard or much of anything else. Friday's lack of motivation is painting a target on his back and if he's not careful, he might end up replaced.

And if matters were not complex enough, someone is trying to kill Thursday. Our plucky protagonist will have to use every ounce of her wit and experience if she's to escape this latest batch of trouble.

This book is positively unhinged. The reader finds themselves careening from one thrilling sequence to another with barely a moment to read in between. I love living in the mind of this author and being treated to his particular brand of intense but light-hearted adventure. This book was a complete pleasure from beginning to end. show less

I love this series. L-O-V-E. It appeals to my silly side with it's sharpish wit, backwards puns, and convoluted, slightly satirical interpretations of the world; it appeals to my academic side with the plethora of literary allusions that make me feel like part of the club. Above all, however, it pulls me in with the charm of its fantasy: who among us doesn't want to literally get into a book?

Jasper Fforde is rapidly becoming the true heir to Douglas Adams: DNA was essentially a sketch writer, and could write sparkling little skits based round ideas, but had trouble stringing them together in a coherent story. Fforde is similarly ideas-driven, and will bend his plots to accomodate them, but he is much better at plotting than DNA ever was. Readers of TN 1- 4 will find TN 5 absolutely stuffed with ideas, many of them mind-bendingly brilliant, hung on a pretty nifty plot; the characterisation suffers a little as a consequence, but, hey, nobody's perfect. In short, it's business as usual in Thursdayverse, complete with some very funny jokes, a rare crop of vile puns, a whole shedload of literary and other references, and the show more usual ration of spelling mistakes (Jasper cannot spell for toffee, and while the proof-readers catch most of them, the homonyms get through every time). He's never likely to be accused of literature; but it's fun, and funny, and snaps and crackles with more energy than fifty other books. 4/5 stars; buy it.

One serious note: Aornis' revenge on Thursday is seriously creepy and disturbing. That's how you portray evil. Maybe he can write a bit, after all ... :-) show less

from Deborah:

The worst of science fiction or fantasy makes you think a bit because they present alternative worlds with alternative rules that make you constantly cross reference what you know, or think you know, about your own. Thursday Next-First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde is complex, comic sc-fi so, as hilarious as it gets, your brain gets a healthy workout as well.

As this series has proceeded, Thursday is now united with her re-actualized husband who had been erased from existence and memory during part of their marriage. She is keeping her real job as a BookWorld literary detective secret from her husband and children to protect them from worry while she deals with complexities that bleed over from the alternative universe she show more patrols. Some of these annoyances are dealing with a vengeful, rampaging minotaur and having to train two new detective recruits who happen to be literary versions of herself.

Her home life is complicated enough as she deals not only with her son and daughters but two possible alternative sons, her uncle who can’t remember why he is returning as a ghost, and the fact that the universe will collapse soon unless her slacker son quickly veers into being one of the alternative versions of himself in order to step up and save the day.

If you love literature, the Bennets from Pride and Prejudice, Beatrix Potter’s Mrs.Tiggy-Winkle, and Temperance Brennen from forensic crime fiction make their appearances. If you love science fiction, parallel universes and the intricacies of time travel should keep you happy. If you love a good laugh, you have got everything from grammatical puns to the absurdities of the bureaucracies of literature.

I wouldn’t step into this universe mid-stream. Wade in with the first book so you will enjoy all the references to past events.

Here is a typical sampling of English major humor:

There was a muttering from the assembled agents. BookCon was the sort of event that was too large and too varied to keep all factions happy, and the previous year’s decision to lift the restriction on Abstract Concepts attending as delegates opened the floodgates to a multitude of Literary Theories and Grammatical Conventions who spent most of the time pontificating loftily and causing trouble at the bar, where fights broke out at the drop of a participle. When Postconstructuralism got into a fight with Classicism, they were all banned, something that upset Subjunctives no end, who complained bitterly that if they had been fighting, they would have won. show less

I love this series so much. I’ve shamefully waited almost three year to read the fifth book, but luckily I wasn’t disappointed. Fourteen years have passed since the end of the 4th book and Thursday has adjusted to her life as a wife and mother, though she may not have given up her work as a literary detective quite as completely as she led her husband to believe. Thursday Next, a literary detective, lives with her husband and kids, Friday, Tuesday and Jenny.

I am constantly astounded by Fforde’s cleverness. He must have such a brilliant mind. His plots are so complex and he always manages to tie everything together beautifully. He’s like the strange literary child of Douglas Adams and P.G. Wodehouse. My favorite part of his show more books is always the humor and the fantastic literary jokes. For example in one scene Next is talking about a new cadet being inexperienced and said …

“This one was as green as Brighton Rock.”

I know that it’s this very cleverness that is what some readers don’t like and I think he’s one of those authors you either adore or just don’t like. One thing I’ve discovered is that I appreciate these books more now that I’ve had a chance to dig farther into the classics. I get more of the references and humor.

In this Thursday Next book there’s a strange paradox of the other Thursday Next books being referenced within the book. They are part of Book World, just like any book, but it’s odd to wrap your head around. There is Book World, the land inside of books and there is “Outland” the real world. There’s a great explanation about why Outland is so wonderful. There’s a richness in detail in Outland that can’t be matched in the Book World, because in books things like carrots are described simply as a rods of orange, there’s no detail or difference from one carrot to another. Thursday describes it as “living in Lego Land.”

Just a few fantastic bits that I enjoyed:

1) At one meeting in the Book World Harry Potter is unable to attend because of copyright restrictions.

2) There’s an illegal cheese market, because seriously guys, good cheese is worth buying illegally, it just is.

3) There’s a terrorist threat from the Racy Novels genre, they threaten to drop a “dirty bomb” into serious book. Imagine a sex scene popping up in the middle of a scientific text book or something, hilarious!

4) A serial killer, like a book series… get it. Bahahaha.

5) Generic characters in books often assimilate to the strongest personality, so there are armies of Danverclones, Generics who became Miss Danvers from Rebecca.

BOTTOM LINE: Start with The Eyre Affair, if you like it then keep going with the series because it just gets better. If you don’t like the first one then it’s probably not for you.

"She was the sort of parent you would want to have living close by, but only on the grounds that she would then never come to stay."

“Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so." show less

The doorbell rang.
'Ooooh!' said Polly, peering furtively out the window. 'What fun. It looks like a market researcher!'
'Right,' said my mother in a very military tone. 'Let's see how long we can keep him before he runs out screaming. I'll pretend to have mild dementia, and you can complain about your sciatica in German. We'll try to beat our personal Market-Researcher Containment record of two hours and twelve minutes.'

In the fifth Thursday Next novel, set fifteen years after book four, most of SpecOps has been disbanded, so Thursday and some of her former colleagues have set up a floor-coverings company, while continuing their SpecOps work unofficially. Thursday is also running a cheese smuggling operation with her stalker, Millon de show more Floss, and working as a Jurisfication agent in the Book World, while keeping her husband Landon in the dark about all her unorthodox activities, preferring that he should see her as a wife and mother of three who works as a carpet fitter.

With Aornis Hades jailed in a time loop and Goliath keeping very quiet, everything should be going well, but the inhabitants of Book World are worried because reading rates in the Outland are falling drastically, and the ChronoGuards are panicking because sixteen-year-old Friday Next is refusing to join the ChronoGuards and the secret of time travel still hasn't been invented.

Meanwhile, Thursday is assessing two troublesome Jurisfiction cadets; leather-clad, gun-toting Thursday1-4, protagonist of "The Eyre Affair" and its three sequels, and birkenstock-wearing hippy Thursday5, from the fifth novel "The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco", which Thursday had insisted should not be full of sex and violence but went too far the other way, and was therefore a lot less popular than the other books in the series.

A very convoluted tale, which I definitely preferred to books three and four, so the title is rather apt. show less