Booklist review of WOLP
Posted by:
FionaCat (---.accel.pas.earthlink.net)
Date: January 09, 2004 12:32AM
I got the December 15 issue of Booklist at work today and it contains a review of WOLP :
"Anyone who thinks there's really nothing new in fiction hasn't been reading Fforde's wildly inventive, genre-bending Thursday Next series. Next is a detective who inhabits a fantasy-world Britain in which literature is very much alive -- so alive, in fact, that it takes a dedicated machinery of justice to keep the plots in order and the characters in place. After rescuing a kidnapped Jane Eyre in The Eyre Affair (2002) and battling an evil multinational corporation seeking to exploit the world of fiction in Lost in a Good Book (2003), Next has beaten a strategic retreat into BookWorld, where as part of the Character Exchange Program, she hides out in an unpublished, by-the-numbers police procedural. She's pregnant, her husband has been killed before he really existed, and her memories of him are being eaten away by a mindworm. She can't rest for long, however; she's still a trainee agent in the BookWorld police force, JurisFiction, and soon fiction itself is under a greater threat than ever before. Fforde is a terrifically agile writer, and his central conceit -- that books are not constructed by authors but by a busy parallel world of goofy but industrious creatures -- allows him to deck this tasty cake of a book with seemingly endless layers. Amid the humor, wordplay, and fun with fiction's conventions, there's both a decent mystery and a book lover's plea to save the world's messiness from corporate streamlining. This will surely delight bookworms -- and real people, too."