The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book was recommended to me by a friend. I was told that I didn’t need to have read Jane Eyre previously to understand the book but I’m really glad I read it first. As far as I’m concerned you definitely need to have read Jane Eyre first otherwise the biggest plot of the book won’t even matter to you.
This book took me quite a long time to get interested in. I think it was the complete lack of knowing what was going on. Most of the time it didn’t make any sense. I got a little giggle at some pop culture references but many I didn’t understand or care enough about.
I didn’t particularly care about Thursday either. She didn’t make me feel sympathetic to her issues and where her life had ended up. I was more interested in Landen and would love to have seen a day with her Dad. Now he seemed like a character I could get interested in.
Then here is Hades, he could have been an excellent villain but he really wasn’t fleshed out. He was just a bit crazy and mostly a sociopath, which is something I usually love in a villain but he just wasn’t well written.
Overall the book was a good read but I probably wouldn’t pick it up again and if it hadn’t been recommended to me probably would never have read it in the first place. The pace just wasn’t fast enough for me.
3 responses to “Reviewed: The Eyre Affair”
So is this book a spoof on Jane Eyre, or is it more like Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells how Mr. Rochester met and married his first wife?
It is actually the story of Thursday Next who is a detective for SpecOps 27 – LiteraTec. Basically, it is kind of a parallel world where there is this whole SpecOps thing and a company called Goliath pretty much rules England.
The history of it got me a bit confused. So what happens is Hades finds a machine that lets you enter the world of a book and you can change it by interacting with the characters… he decides to steal them and bring them back to ‘our world’. Everyone is very upset and Thursday is on the job. One of the books, her favourite, is Jane Eyre so she needs to do what she can to make sure it stays in tact.
Oh I remember having read this in high school. But don’t quite remember what it was about, save for the end. I had read Jane Eyre before, mostly because I had mistakenly stumbled upon it in my parents’ library (my mom was so glad I was reading “serious stuff” too 😛 ).
I keep thinking of reading another one of the series, but can’t really be arsed to buy the book I saw (English books are quite hard to find here… unless they’re classics like Dickens or the like).
I did like the idea that she could get into the book though. Wish I could do that sometimes too. Like cough when reading steamy yaoi manga 😛