Weekly Reader Thursday Next Edition: Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next Series Vol. II) by Jasper Fforde; Thursday Goes Behind the Scenes of Books in One of The Best Volumes in the Series

Weekly Reader Thursday Next Edition: Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next Series Vol.II) by Jasper Fforde; Thursday Goes Behind the Scenes of Books in One of The Best Volumes in the Series


By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: I always said that the Thursday Next series is the Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Wreck-it-Ralph of the literary world. Roger and Ralph take viewers through the world of animation and video games respectively featuring characters from other sources meeting, rubbing elbows, arguing, and showing how they act when they aren't working. The Thursday Next series does the same thing with the world of books.

While The Eyre Affair gave us a small taste of literary character's lives outside of their books by having its protagonist Thursday go into Jane Eyre to save Jane from a dastardly villain, Lost in a Good Book takes us one step beyond. We visit several books and a place called The Great Library where characters visit and congregate during after hours. (i.e. when they aren't being read).

Thursday received much fame for killing villain, Acheron Hades, ending the Crimean War, and not only rescuing Jane Eyre but changing the ending of the Charlotte Bronte novel. (In the Nextian world, the book ended with Jane traveling to India with her cousin St. John Rivers. Thursday changed it to the ending we know that she returns to Thornfield to marry Rochester.) Thursday barely has time to get bored with pointless censored interviews and PR gimmicks when she's on yet another case or cases.

There are plenty of different plots that run through this volume. Thursday and her colleagues receive word of a newly discovered Shakespeare play, Cardenio which just might be the real thing. She hears voices from a man called Akrid Snell, who claims that he is an attorney and she is charged with Fiction Infraction for changing Jane Eyre's ending.

Thursday is also being stalked by coincidences such as a Skyrail ticket arriving at the exact same moment she needs one and a crossword puzzle that conveniently spells out “Meddlesome,” “Thursday” and “Goodbye” before an assassin appears with a gun. Worst of all, her husband Landen Park-Laine has been eradicated (removed from time) and she is pregnant with his child.

Thursday learns that Landen was eradicated by the Goliath Corporation and Spec Ops’ Chrono Guard who need her cooperation to release a Goliath operative from the pages of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven” where she left him in the last book. She reluctantly agrees but does not have access to the Prose Portal which her uncle built and allowed her to travel into books. Using some coaching from her grandmother and a Japanese woman who also have the ability to travel into books, Thursday is able to travel into the Book World without the Prose Portal.

The Book World of Jasper Fforde's series is very well thought out from creatures called gramnasites who fix grammatical errors to the Bowderlizers, a group bent on removing content that they consider objectionable. There is even a law enforcement organization called Jurisfiction, whose job it is to protect books from within by making sure characters don't hop into other books and plot holes are nicely filled.

Akrid Snell, Thursday's attorney, is a member of Jurisfiction and he represents Thursday at her Fiction Infraction trial. After a very confusing trial in-what else?-Franz Kafka's “The Trial”- Thursday is introduced to the Jurisfiction staff. This is when Fforde's imagination really takes flight.

Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Wreck-it-Ralph, part of the fun of the Thursday Next series is watching different fictional characters interact with each other. Whereas The Eyre Affair was mostly limited to just Jane Eyre's characters, this one has more fun with the literary cameos. Thursday is trained by Miss Havisham of Great Expectations fame. While she is as much a man hater as she is in Dickens's original work, she is also prone to driving fast and reading trashy romance novels which she fights the Red Queen of Alice Through the Looking Glass to own. The Jurisfiction agents meet in Norland Park, home to the Dashwood family of Sense and Sensibility. Other Jurisfiction operatives include Falstaff from Shakespeare's Henry IV and Merry Wives of Windsor, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle one of Beatrix Potter's charming characters, and the Cheshire-oh sorry Unitary Authority of WarringtonCat (rezoning laws forced him to change his name). The Cat is also the Director of the Great Library, where all of the books that are or will be written are kept.


Sometimes Fforde has to resort to his own made up characters to stand in for real ones such as the aforementioned Snell and his partner, Perkins who represent every crime solving detective duo ever, Commander Bradshaw, an adventurer in the style of H. Rider Haggard's Alan Quartermaine, and Vernham Deane, the caddish but actually likeable villain of books by trashy romance novelist, Daphne Fahrquitt. Whether they are characters from other author's or Fforde's own writing, the effect is still the same. The Book World is a magnificent place that most literature lovers would dream of visiting. This and Roger Rabbit's Toontown are the ultimate destinations for an imagination influenced road trip.

Besides opening up the Book World, Fforde also opens up his characters particularly Thursday. Thursday goes through a tremendous amount of stress throughout this book and the chapters where she is coming to grip with her husband's disappearance are truly heartfelt. She is particularly stricken with the fact that no one else remembers Landen but her. This is particularly strong when she is given the choice of going to a world where she never met Landen, she chooses to remain in her world because she wants to remember her life as it was, the good and the bad.

Lost in a Good Book is a much darker story than its predecessor. Thursday uses her newfound skills to get the operative out of “The Raven” but is screwed over yet again and hunted down by various enemies. Thursday realizes that she is up against villainy that she cannot yet beat.

Instead of a happy ending, it ends with despair and defeat as Thursday goes into temporary hiding to get away from her various enemies. However she is not surrendering so much as temporarily retreating so she can fight again.

The second volume in the Thursday Next series builds on the concepts of The Eyre Affair and made them better. It makes the Reader want to do what the title suggests: get Lost in a Good Book.