The Woman Who Died A Lot: Let the Literary Hijinks Ensue

The moment I started reading The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, I knew I had found my new favorite author. I later discovered he won the Wodehouse Prize for comic literature in 2004; given my love for P.G. Wodehouse, that was just the icing on the cake. The Woman Who Died A Lot is the seventh book in the Thursday Next series that began with The Eyre Affair. Given the sprawling and inventive nature of the plot, there is nothing I can tell you about this book without telling you to start from the beginning with The Eyre Affair.

The series follows Thursday Next, a woman who works as a Literary Detective in an alternate version of England where people are obsessed with literature to the point that gang warfare breaks out between Marlowe and Shakespeare enthusiasts. In The Eyre Affair, our intrepid heroine uses her uncle's invention of a Prose Portal to enter into books. She ends up chasing a criminal through the world of Jane Eyre, leading to unforeseen and hilarious consequences. The next book in the series, Lost in a Good Book, really gets the ball rolling once Thursday learns how to read herself into books and becomes a member of JurisFiction, the police force within the BookWorld that ensures books and readers are given their proper due. Trained by Great Expectations' Miss Havisham, Thursday has to figure out how things work in the BookWorld while simultaneously dealing with vengeful criminals and the shadowy Goliath Corporation.

Apart from all the literary allusions and cameos from beloved characters in classic literature, there are subplots involving the time-travelling ChronoGuard police force, Thursday's ever-complicated family life, genetically engineered dodos, and a myriad of other mind-bending notions that will keep you on your toes. Throughout, Fforde indulges in some of the wittiest wordplay you could hope to find in modern literature, and every page has a line that is destined to become your favorite. It can be something as simple as a hermit stating that his dinner tonight is a gruel sandwich without the bread, which just struck me as a gloriously silly throw-away line. Every chapter begins with an excerpt from a fake book, like Thursday Next's biography or a treatise on some aspect of the BookWorld, and all these elements mesh together to create a fully-realized and utterly three-dimensional fantasy world that is a sheer delight for any literature lover.

The Woman Who Died A Lot is a wonderful addition to the series, featuring a more battle-worn Thursday who is nearing retirement but still has to deal with the machinations of the scheming mnemonomorph (i.e. memory manipulator), Aornis Hades, as well as an impending smiting from a newly-revealed deity, and a series of fake Thursdays who have to be killed repeatedly. Although the novel concerns itself almost exclusively with Thursday's world than the BookWorld, it is still just as brilliant and funny as any other book in the series. The series is slated to be an octology, so the next book will signal the end of Thursday Next. Until then, however, you have seven glorious books to catch up on.