Thursday Next: First Among Sequels

Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde (fiction, audiobook)

I love the Thursday Next series–the literary allusions, the punny prose, the various plot threads and the way they all tie together at the end. When Something Rotten ended with no indication of more, and Fforde moved on to his Nursery Rhyme Crime series, I was disappointed (not least because The Big Over Easy, the first Nursery Rhyme Crime book, didn’t have the charm of the Thursday Next books), so imagine my excitement at hearing another Next book was coming out.

Thursday is 14 years older in this next installment, and unfortunately (for this reader at least) she seems to have lost some of her magic along the way. The story itself seemed to take a long time getting started, and once it did more than a few scenes felt like plot filler. I was quite shocked, all things considered, to find myself at the end with a cliffhanger–after a three-year wait, I didn’t expect the book to just be a set-up for another installment. It’s possible Fforde recognizes this himself, and is tweaking the reader about it in a couple of scenes (in one, a character is stuck in an endless time loop waiting in line for a register at a TJ Maxx store, and in other a character is trapped on a boat in the middle of a deserted ocean).

While I highly recommend the series, particularly to book nerds, First Among Sequels is a disappointment. I’m sure I’ll read the next book in the series, but shall probably do so with arms crossed, insistent on getting a better experience than this go-round.