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Book Reviews: Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots
As I've mentioned before, while Lauren and I drive large distances this summer, we're listening to audiobooks, two of which have been the second and third entries in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, set in an alternate 1980s Britain where the fact of the Crimean War lasting into the '80s is the least of the differences from our world. Our hero, Miss Thursday Next, begins the series as an agent of Spec Ops, the special operations forces that police everything from time travel to supernatural beasties, to Thursday's own agency, Literatech, which handles such mundane things as attempted literary forgeries... as well as the kidnapping and murder of literary characters, should such things occur. And, in this world, they can.
In the second installment, Lost in a Good Book, Thursday has to save the world from ending in a whip-cream-like confection while simultaneously dealing with fallout of the events of the first book (The Eyre Affair), which includes representatives of the Goliath Corporation (who want their representative, Jack Schitt, returned from Poe's "The Raven," where Thursday marooned him) and the sister of the first novel's villain, Acheron Hades (who wants revenge for her brother's death). In this installment, we see more of this strange world, from the extended effects of time travel to the resurrection of Neaderthals (and the issues of rights that do--or don't--accompany such a thing). We also meet a group called Jurisfiction, which travels through books, policing them to make sure plots are not altered, and including both "real" people like Thursday (and, historically, Ambrose Bierce and Voltaire) and such literary figures as Miss Havisham (from Great Expectations), and the Red Queen and Cheshire Cat from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
By the end of the second installment, things have gotten better (the world is saved, for instance) and worse (I won't say just how), and Thursday takes a bit of a vacation for her own protection by hiding out in an unpublished manuscript, setting the stage for the third volume, The Well of Lost Plots, which focuses on the book world and Jurisfiction, for which Thursday now works.
While Lost in a Good Book continues the same fun, adventurous style that The Eyre Affair brought to us, The Well of Lost Plots bogged down quite a bit at its beginning, quite possibly from too much exposition as we're introduced to the world of Jurisfiction. By the time the novel came to its conclusion, we'd enjoyed it, but it seemed to us to be the weakest of the three we've read so far.
And technically, we didn't read any of them: we had them read to us. And Elisabeth Sastre's voicing of the novel continued to be one of our favorite aspects of the experience. In part, it's just the Britishisms which we find so darned cute, but she really has a great talent for voicing the different characters as she reads to us.