Fforde, Jasper - The Eyre Affair

[oyceter]

Another one of the "I was running out of books and desperately had to pick something up" buys. Plus, the cover described it as a cross between Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, and Buffy.

It's not all that much like Buffy imho, but it's good fun, especially to a bookworm. It's set in an alternate Britain which needs time cops and literary detectives, and that alone would have snagged me -- it's a world in which people ardently care as to who really wrote Shakespeare's plays and Baconians go around protesting and there is a Bronte Appreciation Society.

Very much a mystery novel type voice, so I didn't get very emotionally involved, but then, I didn't quite think that was the point. I was having fun with the Jane Eyre stuff (I really need to read that now).

I did also feel Thursday's long-lost love thing with Landen was kind of stupid.

I think my brain has just shut down.

Mostly the book made me think more about the Genre Rant and how it is really a sci-fi book or a mystery, but it's shelved in literature because it's respectable. Kind of like the marketing for Crusie -- she says she's still writing romances, but that's not how they're selling them.

Links:
- rilina's review
- minnow1212's review

Comments

[oyceter]

I was okay with that (probably because I was luxuriating in a book-centered world), but I think my main problem was I really had no emotional attachment to Thursday and her problems at all. It played funny and was fairly easy to read, but there's no real drive to find out what happens next to her.

I was interested about the Crusie thing, because I read a snippet on her website on other romance authors migrating to "women's fiction" and how she would steadfastly continue to write romance, because that's what she fell in love with. So I have to hunt for her in various places ... and some have her more recent books in general lit and the Mira reprints in romance.

Very agree about the chick-lit stigma, at least seen via the derogatory comments of the buyers at the bookstore. And while I'm sure a ton of them are probably awful, just because most stuff is, I'm still mad that there's not this horrible stigma connected to thrillers or something, some of which I find to be equally stupid. But then, that's the Genre Rant.