Thursday Next: First Among Sequels is the fourth of the Thursday Next novels. It is also quite possibly the silliest (in a good way) of this series so far! How silly is it, you ask? Let's just say that the sudden giggle rate herein is way, way high. But I digress, as I first should tell you something about the series. So let's have Thursday herself tell us what's going on as she relates in The Jurisfiction Chronicles -- chapter one heading of the Something Rotten novel :

Jurisfiction is the name given to the policing agency inside books. Working with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of Text Grand Central, the many Prose Resource Operatives at Jurisfiction work tirelessly to maintain the continuity of the narrative within the pages of all the books ever written. Performing this sometimes thankless task, Jurisfiction agents live mostly on their wits as they attempt to reconcile the author's original wishes and readers' expectations against a strict and largely pointless set of bureaucratic guidelines laid down by the Council of Genres. I headed Jurisfiction for over two years and was always astounded by the variety of the work: one day I might be attempting to coax the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets, and the next I would be thwarting the Martians' latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge. It was challenging and full of bizarre twists. But when the peculiar and downright weird becomes commonplace, you begin to yearn for the banal.

Got that? The first reviewer at Green Man to review this series was Michael M. Jones, who looked at the first novel in this series:

Fforde has created a truly unique, fascinating new world, filled with over-the-top characters and an unforgettable atmosphere. This is the sort of book Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett might have created if they'd ground up Dickens and Lewis Carroll for some highly unorthodox cigars, and gotten schnackered one fine weekend. The humor is unconventional, the literary tributes unmistakable, and the plot highly original. This is a world where people go to Richard III in the same way they might see the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the real world, right down to the audience participation. This is a world where just about anything can happen, and seems rather likely to happen anyway. Time-traveling literary detectives, extinct species brought back as pets, a villain worthy of any hero, and enough twists to keep even the most scholarly of English majors bemused.

Now it gets complicated. Fourteen years have passed since the events in The Well of Lost Plots -- The Eyre Affair and Something Rotten were respectively the first two in this series -- and Thursday has apparently settled down to being merely a carpet layer as most of SCO has been disbanded. Sure -- we believe that, don't we? Her husband, Landen (now unversed), believes that Thursday given up her agenting for good. HA! Acme (!) Carpets is merely the cover her SCO group who pay for their activities laying carpets and by Thursday selling illegal cheese smuggled in from the Free Republic of Wales. (Kage Baker in her Company series has cheese and other banned foods smuggled into England from the Celtic Fringe.) The riff upon types of cheeses was silly enough to make me laugh rather deeply!

Her SCO work in turn is just a pretense as she is still the only non-Bookworld involved in Jurisfiction. All of which is hidden (she thinks) from her family. Oh, did I mention that Fforde suggests here that the events preceding this book are actually just novels that are rather embellished versions of what really happened? Wait 'til you meet Thursday Next 1-4 (VIOLENCE! SEX! VIOLENCE! Think an R-rated Emma Peel) or Thursday 5 who is the Thursday that Thursday wanted in her novels. (Confused? Go read Robert Heinlein's 'By His Bootstraps' or Fritz Leiber's Big Time.) Thursday 5 is, errrr, a mild-mannered sort of Thursday. Guess which novels sold very well?

Indeed Heinlein would be very understanding of what Fforde has undertaken here as the multiple versions of Thursday, and Friday, her son in various points in his history, are a logical riff off the later novels Heinlein did. Watch for how the characters here solve their bootstrap problem! And see how the falling readership of books -- watch for his depiction of a megabookstore with scarcely any books in it but lots of coffeeshops! -- is dealt with. Oh, did I mention a demon or two up to no good? And lethal cheese? Really lethal cheese?

Grab a cup of tea, some chocolate biscuits, and settle down in a very comfortable chair for a long, funny, and quite witty read. Now I can't wait to see where Fforde takes the series from here!

[Cat Eldridge]