The Woman Who Died A Lot by Jasper FForde

Thursday Next is dealing with getting older and not healing so fast from her last near fatal accident in One of our Thursdays is Missing.   The opening of this novel finds her in a career crisis, dealing with memories that aren’t real and a threat to the city she lives in.  Her accident has prevented her from being able to do her detective work within the Book World so she’s faced with dealing with the real world problems.  Well, real in Jasper FForde’s sense of the word

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While I missed the adventures that usually take place in the Book world, this is still a very book related story.  In fact Thursday’s new job is as chief librarian of the city’s library.  This story tackles politics and religion in a typical FForde tongue in cheek style along with some time travel anomalies. 

It all makes for a mind bending story.  There are some paragraphs that I had to read twice just to figure out what he was saying but that’s part of the charm of the book at least for me.  If you are a Jasper FForde fan you will enjoy these continued adventures of Thursday Next who does indeed die a lot in this story, or does she?

One of our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper FForde

This is a pure fantasy novel so if that’s not your genre you won’t enjoy the book. However, if you have a great imagination and love books and have always wondered what happens really inside a book when the reader stops reading then this series is for you.

This is the 6th book in this long running series. The main premise of the series is that there is a book world that exists alongside the real world. Thursday Next is a literary detective who can jump between the real world and the book world to solve problems. We first met her in The Eyre Affair where she was instrumental in stopping a criminal who was kidnapping book characters and holding them for ransom. Over the years, she’s gotten married, had children (named Tuesday and Friday of course) and continued to bridge the gap between the real world and the book world.

While I was writing this I decided that it’s impossible to give the plot line for this novel. If you haven’t read the series you won’t have a clue what’s going on; so if you’re interested start with the first book The Eyre Affair. Having said that, this is a great continuation of the series. It’s funny, very imaginative and totally believable in an odd fantasy sort of way. There are actually a few pictures in the book, art that adds to the written text in helping you to imagine what the settings look like.

I hope I’ve piqued your interest enough to give this series a try. It's definitely worth reading.