Friday, August 17, 2007

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

A frolicking read... Britain is a surreal world here... Will-Speaks spout lines from Shakespearean plays and audiences perform Richard III nightly... time travel is frequent... debates rage over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays... even vampires and werewolves are a menace... Britain and Russia have warred for years over the Crimea... and the Prose Portal allows you to jump into a book and live in that world...

The fun doesn't stop there as Thursday Next tries to save Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit and, later, Bronte's Jane Eyre... with the manuscripts stolen by Hades, the third-most evil man on the planet, any change he (or anyone else) makes to the story when inside the book changes all copies of the book... Thursday lives in Jane Eyre to stop Hades and rescue her aunt from entrapment in Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"... add a love triangle, and the entertainment never ceases...

The novel is delightful, especially for bibliophiles, with all its literary references... I think the end is hurried and has too many cases of deus ex machina, but that may be expected from a quick and light read like this... Still, a thoroughly enjoyable book...

I thank K-Dog for the recommendation!

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