Lost in a Good Book
By Jasper Fforde
Viking 2002


Lost in a Good Book is the second Thursday Next novel, the first being The Eyre Affair; these books should absolutely be read in the correct order, so if you have not read The Eyre Affair, go and do that first. You will not regret it.

This novel starts shortly after Eyre ends, with Thursday and Landon settling into married life, the media frenzy over the changes in Jane Eyre is still going strong, and Acheron Hades still dead... almost certainly. And exciting events are afoot -- someone appears to have come across a lost Shakespeare play, Thursday's father visits from the future with the news that the world is going to end next week, and Goliath Corporation is seriously pissed off that their operative is still stranded in a dark and dire work of poetry. Oh, and the inter-book legal system is talking about arresting Thursday for changing Jane Eyre, which makes just as little sense to her as it does to you. Things escalate from there on out.

If you enjoyed the first book, you should absolutely read Lost in a Good Book. The writing style and calm introductions of new and interesting oddities is the same, the plot is perhaps a bit more convoluted, and it ends with a cliffhanger that will shoot you right into the next book in the series.

The Thursday next series starts out a bit silly, and slides further and further into silliness as it goes along. Where exactly your too-silly threshold lies is a matter of personal preference, but I consider this book firmly on the "sufficiently unsilly" side of the fence. It does, however, take place largely in the bookworld, which is the bit of unnecessary weirdness that will eventually break the series' back. The next book in the series, The Well of Lost Plots, slides ever nearer to jumping the shark, although I certainly still enjoyed it.

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