Budgetary overruns almost buried the remaking before the planning stage, until relief came from an unexpected quarter. A spate of dodgy accounting practices in the Outland necessitated a new genre in Fiction: Creative Accountancy. Shunned by many as `not a proper genre at all,' the members' skills at turning thin air into billion-dollar profits were suddenly of huge use, and the remaking went ahead as planned. Enron may have been a pit of vipers in the Outland, but they quite literally saved the BookWorld.
Bradshaw's BookWorld Companion (16th edition)
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| from http://www.jasperfforde.com/ |
When I first received this book in the mail, from Amazon of course, I was excited to see a map drawn on the first few pages. Every since I read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, it's been one of my favorite things to see in a book. I love to compare the location of things as I am reading through the story. I have to admit I was somewhat confused by the map in this novel since readers of the series know that the layout of bookworld isn't entirely known to the reader or its inhabitants. After reading the first few chapters I discovered the reason: Bookworld was being reorganized to more closely resemble the Outland, or Real World.
Told from the point of view of the Written Thursday, what I really like about this novel is that Fforde is not afraid to completely change what we know about this world he's created. He starts out with a different Thursday as his main character then reshapes the Bookworld. It really keeps a reader on his or her toes and challenges what we have come to expect from this series. I feel like I should have gone back and read First Among Sequels before diving into One of Our Thursdays is Missing as a few plot points from the previous novel were fuzzy and I was looking for answers in the new one. This is clearly my own memory fault and not that of the author's.
Undoubtedly, this is still one of my favorite series and I highly recommend it to anyone. The basic premise of the series is a character who lives in an alternate-reality Swindon, UK and has the ability to jump into novels and interact with the characters as if they were actors in a play. Using Written Thursday as the POV on this one allows the reader to learn a little bit more about what it means to be a book character in the Nextian Universe. Fforde pulls in a lot of our current events into this narrative and even touches on what the invention of e-readers has done to their environment.
My other favorite quote from the book:
This was the annoying side of the feedback loop; irrespective of how she had once looked or even wanted to look, [the lady of shallot] was now a pre-raphaelite beauty... She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation....Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.
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