For the past couple of years I’ve been hearing about how the Thursday Next series is a great series of books and everything I’ve heard about it has definitely made me think that the series would be a great read. So I put it on my list of books to check out, and when this book came up as the alt for the Vaginal Fantasy July read I thought it would be the perfect time to actually read it (especially because the main book this month cause physical revulsion just from reading the description and from the discussion on the forums I feel pretty good about my decision not to read it). However, I could not get into the book at all. I’m not really sure why, on paper this should be the perfect book for me, but in practice I just did not like the book. Not one whit. I gave up on the book about halfway through. That’s far more than I’ve given other books and I think if you’ve reached the halfway point and still have no real idea what’s going on, nor care about a single character, then it’s probably time to move on to the next book.
I’m going to pull the plot from Goodreads, because my brain just refused to gather the pieces and put together a plot. I mean, I think there was something about an evil time travelling/book travelling guy who was so super dangerous and people thought we was offed in the first third of the book but he’s so sneaky that it was just another one of his fake outs. And Thursday kept having clandestine meetings with her father, another time criminal but not the dangerous kind. And then there was something about books and going into books and changing the plots of the books, which is bad. I don’t know. I really don’t. Here’s what Goodreads says:
In Jasper Fforde’s Great Britain, circa 1985, 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 and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde’s ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel–unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix.
I mean…. I guess that’s what was going on? That description sounds enticing and interesting, but I think something was lacking in the execution. This one was not for me.