The Eyre Affair

It's interesting to completely hate the ending of one book, and then finding yourself rooting for the exact same ending in a different book. But Fforde managed to write a pretty sympathetic Rochester. A Mr. Rochester that I could cheer on, and who I felt almost deserved to be happy with Jane by the end of the book. Though that could also be because he just skipped over the grosser aspects of Rochester's character, focusing on his good qualities, and the limitations imposed on him by being a fictional character.

Jasper Fforde writes some really weird stuff. And while The Eyre Affair wasn't as much a trip as Shades of Grey, it was still a strange experience. Albeit, an experience that I could empathize with a bit more. This is a world that I almost want to live in.

The Eyre Affair takes place in an alternate-London in 1985. In this alternate world, England has been at war with Russia for over 100 years, time travel is possible, and the boundary between fiction and reality is starting to thin. It's possible to get lost in a poem or take a trip in a novel. It's also possible to pull characters out of their novels into the real world. And if you alter something in the original manuscript, it will alter all other copies of that work throughout the world.

It's against this background that an infamous criminal steals the original manuscript of Charles Dickens' Chuzzlewit and begins to hold the characters hostage. Literary Detective, Thursday Next, is tasked with stopping him. Mostly because she has a past with him and is one of only a few people who are able to resist his strange mind-control powers.

This book was an absolute delight, with literary references peppered throughout. I probably missed a bunch of them, but the ones I caught on to were delightful. I had to look up a few things (I'm not very familiar with Charles Dickens' work), but it was still fun to work things out. And I felt especially smart when I figured out that the main bad guy was a vampire way before any of the other characters. Though that was mostly because I was so excited to discover that vampires were real in this book.

There are a bunch of books in this series after this one, and I'm excited to get my hands on all of them. Especially because the time travel gave a glimpse of what looks to be a very exciting scene in a future book.

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