Book Review: First Among Sequels

Reviewed By: Lynn Harnett

First Among Sequels     Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
Jasper Fforde
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Science Fiction   Time Travel   Alternate History
Series: Thursday Next # 5

The fifth in the agent Thursday Next series remains as zany as ever as Thursday trains highly unsatisfactory fictional versions of herself for Jurisfiction duty in the BookWorld while in the Real World the Stupidity Quotient has taken on alarming proportions since the new reasonable government has not done enough to use it up.

As if this isn’t enough, her slothful 16-year-old son Friday, who is supposed to join the ChronoGuard (which maintains the integrity of time) and save the world, refuses even to get up in the morning and the ChronoGuard, facing the imminent end of the universe as we know it, wants to replace him with an equally legitimate alternate of himself whose clean-cut looks and confident sense of responsibility meet his parents’ wishful expectations.

Meanwhile Sherlock Holmes is dead, the humor has been highjacked from the Thomas Hardy novels and the Reader Index is dropping steadily. The BookWorld and RealWorld profiteers are conniving at turning the classics into reality TV, starting with “Pride and Prejudice” as “The Bennetts,” which would erase the original for all time, and the dastardly Goliath Company, suspiciously open and humble, is planning something nefarious, even if Thursday can’t figure out what it is, and it really is time to tell her beloved husband Landen that she never left off being a Special Ops agent and her job at the Acme Carpet Co. is, mostly, a front.

Punny, funny and imaginatively delightful, this latest ties up all the major loose ends while leaving lots of subplots dangling for the next installment.

Lynn Harnett

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett