Finished Jasper Fforde's
One of our Thursdays is Missing and I am glad I returned to the series. I thought the plot had become overly complex with the multiple Thursdays, time travel and alternate universes. A story revolving around the "written" Thursday was ingeneous in that Fforde created essentially a blank slate to start over while remaining in canon.
What remains is clever wordplay involving the more famous books and their characters combined with an amazing grasp of the history and structure of written language.
Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn’t just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he’d have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.
...dropped out of the litotes market, which...
“Epizeuxis,” murmured Sprockett, “a rhetorical device that repeats the same word in the same sentence for increased dramatic effect. This book was almost certainly destroyed by a rhetorical worm.”
The trip back downriver was uneventful and over in only twelve words.
Its this kind of smart stuff that made this a pleasure to read. In large doses it would be annoying no matter how clever and subtle. Recommend reading a book between each novel if you plan on reading the series in one go.
The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Baker is the first of the Prince of Nothing Trilogy. If you enjoyed the depth of Steven Erickson's Tale of Malazan series you will likely enjoy this series. The first book develops some interesting characters but overreaches when it comes to world building. The back-history and geopolitical layout is crammed in awkwardly. It might be needed later but the over-imaginative spelling and fun with umlauts is unnecessary.
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