I just finished
First Among Sequels, the fifth Thursday Next book (and yes, the seemingly nonsensical title is a plot point). Have to say I was a bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong, at his best he's still hilarious and he manages to find some new angles on what, in the hands of a less competent author, would have been a one-joke series. In this book, Thursday not only has to tackle declining read rates as the British public have stopped reading books and turned to reality TV instead, but she also has to work with not one but
two fictional versions of herself, solve the murder of Sherlock Holmes, stop the cast of
Othello from behaving reasonably, and stop the other literary genres from going to preemptive war against Racy Novels. And as always it's all quite clever, chock full of metafictional jokes, cameos by other literary heroes and villains (Harry Potter is expected to show up, but eventually declines due to copyright reasons) and time-travel jokes. And it all looks to shape up into one of the best books of the series...
...until it all falls apart towards the end. Really. I can handle that Fforde drops some of the plot lines without even mentioning them again - most of them are little more than jokes, anyway, and most of the main plot resolves itself nicely into a satisfactory little bundle - and then WHAM, pointless cliffhanger ending. Huh? Come on, Jasper. You know better than that. A pity, since the first 370 pages or so are a lot of fun.
