Something Rotten

By Jasper Fforde

The fourth novel in the Thursday Next series. In this book, Thursday is now back in the real world with her toddler son, Friday. She is still part of Jurisfiction but, needing money, she goes back to work for Special Operations, a branch of law enforcement.
Thursday wants to get her eradicated husband, Landen, back. She also needs to track down Yorrick Kaine, an escapee from an unknown book. Kaine has risen to high position in the government and has even higher ambition. If Kaine succeeds, he will start a war that will bring about Armageddon.

Wikipedia has a really informative entry that does an excellent job of explaining the universe of the Thursday Next stories. It is helpful even to those who have read the first three books in the series. The novels can be a bit overwhelming there is so much to keep in mind. Thursday's Britain is not our Britain and then there is the world of books and all its characters and creatures that sneak in and out of Thursday's world.

I did enjoy this story and parts of it were quite funny. The story line seemed a bit more straight forward than some of the earlier stories. For the most part, I didn't feel as lost as I sometimes did in the other books.

The Well of Lost Plots

By Jasper Fforde

Thursday Next has had a rough time of it. So she has left the real world and moved into BookWorld, taking up residence in an unpublished detective novel. While there, she will be working for Jurisfiction as an agent in training under the supervision of Miss Havisham, the jilted bride from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. 
In the previous novel, Lost in a Good Book, Thursday's husband was erased from history and Thursday found she was pregnant and that she is the only one who remembers her husband. But she is starting to forget him too, due to her enemy, Acornis Hades. Acornis has the power to mess with people's memories and she has planted a mindworm in Thursday's mind that is slowly erasing her memories of her husband and trying to implant new memories of a life in which he never existed.
Thursday is planning on staying in BookWorld until after her baby is born.
BookWorld is on the cusp of introducing a new book operating system, UltraWord™, which is supposed to greatly enhance the reader's experience and streamline BookWorld operations. But Thursday gradually comes to understand that UltraWord™ is an evil plot to generate revenue to make rich people richer. Once again it is Thursday vs a heartless, greedy bunch of capitalists.

Fforde keeps making the Thursday Next universe more and more complicated. So much is mentioned in the BookWorld dimension that is becomes a tad overwhelming. Combined with a rather lackluster plot, this book really doesn't add much to the series.

Review by Publishers Weekly.

Lost in a Good Book

By Jasper Fforde

A continuation from the first book, The Eyre Affair, in which Thursday Next killed arch-criminal Acheron Hades and imprisoned Goliath Corporation operative Jack Schitt in Poe's poem The Raven.
Now married to her lover from the first story, Landen, and pregnant with their baby, Thursday finds herself being hunted by persons unknown and the Goliath people demanding that she free Schitt from Poe's famous poem. When she refuses, Goliath agents go back in time and erase Landen when he was just a toddler, promising to bring him back when she brings back Jack Schitt. But not only do they want Schitt, they also want the Prose Portal, the device that enables humans to enter the word of the written word. And its inventor, Thursday's Uncle Mycroft.

This was a weird story, just like the first one. All this jumping about in time and in and out of books is more than a little confusing. At one point in the story Thursday is shot dead, but comes back, thanks to time travel, but I really didn't understand that part. A lot of this story doesn't make much sense, but that is part of its charm, I think.
Anyway, I enjoyed the story and am looking forward to the next in the series, The Well of Lost Plots.

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

By Jasper Fforde

The real Thursday is missing and the written Thursday gets entangled with all sorts of nefarious characters in an attempt to track down the real Thursday.

In the world of Thursday Next, books live in a land of their own, populated by their characters. As an agent of Jurisfiction, Thursday helps keep the books and their characters in line and uncorrupted by outside influences. But some of the books are on the verge of war and Thursday's services are required to help broker a peace settlement. But she has disappeared and the fictional Thursday finds herself trying to maintain her own book and its attendant characters and also conduct an investigation into some strange occurrences in the world of books that leads her on the trail of the lost Thursday and into the middle of a war zone.


I always find it hard to wrap my mind around the whole concept of a world populated by books, their settings, plots and characters. But even though I found the story rather confusing and dense and often hard to follow, I still enjoyed it quite a lot. It's a hugely complicated world and very strange and anything can happen but also very engrossing and frequently funny and a real wild ride.

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron

By Jasper Fforde

Eddie Russet is an average young man with high ideals. As he comes to find out, high ideals won't get you anywhere in his world. What his society values above all is conformity. What it doesn't want is someone like Eddie with his impertinent questions, his new ideas on how to make things better and his refusal to look the other way.
In Eddie's world, social status is defined by color. Not by the color of one's skin. But by the color you can see. Everyone in Eddie's world is colorblind. People of Eddie's bloodline can see shades of red, to varying degrees. Other groups perceive violet, blue, green, yellow, or orange. No one sees the full spectrum and at the bottom socially are the Greys, who see no color at all. To them the world is just shades of grey.
Which makes for a pretty drab world. Except for the work of National Color. National Color pipes artificial dies of the brightest hues to towns and villages across the land and these dies are used to color the grass, the flowers, whatever and these artificial colors can be seen by all the citizens, even the Greys.
Not only are the people of this world unable to see the full spectrum of visible color, they are very susceptible to the artificial colors created by National Color, which act on them like a narcotic and like medication. Eddie's father is a Swatchman, a kind of physician. He carries a pallet of swatches of color that he uses to treat his patients simply by placing the swatch in the person's line of sight. And if the patient is suffering from a fatal disease, he can view "Lincoln" which is an intense shade of green that induces pleasant hallucinations and eases pain as the person is dying. Naturally, there is a black market in swatches for people using the colors just to get high.
Eddie gets in trouble with the authorities for playing a prank and is sent to a village on the outskirts of society to do a chair census, to count the number of chairs in the village. Going along with Eddie is his dad the Swatchman. The village's resident swatchman has died under suspicious circumstances and Eddie's dad is to fill in until a new swatchman can be found.
Since class is based on color perception, the rule for society is to marry to improve your children's color vision. Reds are only one step up from Grey, and Eddie's family, the Russets, are pretty low in Red. So Eddie has set his sights on a young woman of the Oxblood family, who not only are higher in the social scale but who also own a string factory and are very well off. The Oxblood girl has other suitors and Eddie is sorry to have to leave town and loose his advantage to the other guys.
But while Eddie and his dad are doing some sightseeing, they stumble across a crime scene that may involve black market swatches. And Eddie meets a angry young Grey girl named Jane. Jane knows a lot more about the true state of things than poor, naive Eddie does and as Eddie gets to know Jane better, he finds out that his society is not quite an innocent and benign as he has been brought up to believe.

Eddie lives in a strange world, a world where lightning strikes are frequent and people have to be on the look out for killer swans. Spoons are good as gold. People get high by looking at swatches of color. Most people die of the Mildew, which is a kind of fungus infection that kills within a few hours of exposure. Everything and everyone is tightly controlled, even to the kind of clothes worn in various situations. Being different gets a person a trip to Reboot and no one ever comes back from Reboot. Their society lives on the remains of the highly advanced society that came before, a society so technologically advanced that the roads they created repair themselves.
I found this wonderfully complex new world of Jasper Fforde's simply fascinating. And much more accessible than his Thursday Next series or the Nursery Crime series. Eddie is an innocent who stumbles on the grim truth about Reboot and National Color and even about his own father's profession of Swatchman. It's a strange world, but it works. And I really enjoyed reading about it. Apparently there are two more in the works, Painting by Numbers and The Gordini Protocols. Looking forward very much to reading them when they are published.

The Fourth Bear

By Jasper Fforde

Jack Spratt, who eats no fat, is a detective and in charge of the Nursery Crime Division in Berkshire, a community filled with escapees from fiction and especially from nursery rhymes. Spratt is in trouble with his superiors due to a couple of flawed investigations (he, Red Ridinghood & her granny were all eaten by the big, bad wolf, which isn't as fatal as it sounds) and he is put on leave. Meanwhile a homicidal goodie, the Gingerbreadman, has escaped from the mental hospital and is on a murderous spree. Spratt, operating without official sanction, is investigating the death of Goldilocks and incidentally becomes involved with the Gingerbreadman case and the exploding cucumber gardeners case. These cases also tie in with the smuggling of the forbidden foodstuffs (porridge, honey, marmalade and buns) to the local talking bear population. Somehow, with the help of his colleagues, Mary Mary and Ashley, an ET type alien, Spratt will tie it all together and save his job in the process.

If you are going to read Fforde's fiction, you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief. If you can, you will probably enjoy this novel. I somewhat enjoyed it, when it wasn't irritating me. I didn't like the way the characters know and comment on the fact they are in a novel. I didn't care for the way bears are portrayed. I found the idea that bears get high on porridge and the other controlled foodstuffs just plain stupid. Many of the jokes in this novel are lame puns, as the writer himself admits. Still, as a detective novel, it was pretty good, except I would like to point out that if cake is immersed in water it also falls apart, which means that the whole cookie vs cake thing is still open to question.

For another review of The Fourth Bear, see USA Today.

New Word
Nobbblers: To nobble is to filch or steal. "Prong's champion might have grown even larger were it not for the attentions of a gang of murderous cucumber nobblers who destroyed the cucumber two days after the record was officially set, an attack that tragically cost Prong his life."