After Reading: The Eyre Affair

By: Meradeth Houston on 3:41 AM

A Thursday Next novel, #1

By Jasper Fforde

Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality, (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, veryseriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.


I had a friend of mine get this for me for Christmas and I was actually kind of shocked at how good of a fit it is for me. I mean, it's totally right up my alley in terms of what I look for in a book. Anyhow, needless to say, I loved it! It had me laughing and I always love a book that makes me laugh. I was a little confused at the beginning when they were talking about the "fake" ending to Jane Eyre, as I kept scratching my head and wondering what on earth was going on--I'd read Jane Eyre, and one of my favorite things about it was how it ended. So, yeah, glad I was a total idiot about that :) Anyhow, I'll certainly be looking for the next books in this series. If you like some good literary humor, I totally recommend this one!