Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: High Bridge
Rating: worthy
This audio novel is read by Elizabeth Sastre.
After a sad disappointment in the first novel in this series, The Eyre Affair, I'm hoping for a lot better in volume 2. Failing that, I'll ditch this series and move on to something else. I have to say I was surprised by High Bridge, the audio publishers of the copy I got from the library. When I went to their website to reference this novel, I could find neither the title nor the author anywhere on their site! That's why Barnes & Noble gets the book link.
I was really slow in getting up to speed on this one because of Thanksgiving, but I picked up the pace today and didn't regret it. This one is much better than The Eyre Affair, at least through the first half-dozen chapters. It's much more interesting and a lot funnier, particularly the Hispano-Suiza episode. Of course it doesn't hurt at all that Elizabeth Sastre (not to be confused with Doctor Elizabeth Sastre of the Vanderbilt university medical school) is intelligent, playful, sly, sexy, and a little bit giggly. I love this representation of Thursday.
There's apparently a plot afoot in this novel to assassinate Thursday which, if true, cannot be allowed to succeed under any circumstances! Even if I quit reading the series I would feel saddened if she were not out there somewhere, even if it's just fictionally! The plot comes to a head when the Goliath corporation removes her husband Landon from time, leaving her pregnant in a time when the father of her child died at the age of two! Their plan is to have her free Jack Schitt from Poe's The Raven where she evidently imprisoned him at the end of the last novel, but she has no means to travel into fiction any more, so what's a girl to do?
Fforde continues to exhibit the occasional problem with the English language. For example, at several points, he writes of the Goliath corporation starting his sentence with "Goliath are..." whereas it should be "Goliath is…" At one point (I think in chapter eight) he writes that some people "...leaned forward imperceptibly..." - and this in a novel which is narrated in first person PoV. If the movement was imperceptible, how did the narrator detect it?!
Fforde also seems not to quite grasp a crucial principle of the geometric theory of gravitation, published by Albert Einstein in 1916. People who are undergoing acceleration perceive the effect as gravity. An acceleration of 1G will be indistinguishable from Earth's gravity to those experiencing it. Therefore passengers availing themselves of Fforde's gravity drop transportation system - even if it could be built through Earth's core without melting, and without killing travelers from radiation - would not experience free-fall because of the acceleration!
Finally it looks like I'm getting to the very reason I decided to start this series in the first place! Thursday gets an "in" to the magic library! I was not at all impressed by the disaster of the Cheshite Cat, but I did like Mrs Haversham and the Red Queen - particularly the enigmatic Red Queen, and the whole episode with Spike on the Zombie hunt, which Thursday volunteers for so she can pay her rent with the overtime-rate cash was hilarious.
And this was too much! I went to open the file for this review and this is what I found in the folder listing:
This one managed to hold my attention and amuse me. It's still not as good as One of Our Thursdays is Missing but it is a worthy read.
