Jasper Fforde’s Bookworld novels have expanded from puns and riffs on literary devices and expanded the role of lead Bookworld agent Thursday Next to such an extent that he’s able to have a Bookworld novel that doesn’t get anywhere near Bookworld. The Woman Who Died A Lot is purely a story of Thursday Next, the titular woman who dies a lot in this book (and in the series in general, an her family. I’m excited by this, because it’s obvious that Bookworld is pretty much played out and we need to move into other storylines to keep the series going. Fforde, as always, does a masterful job filling out the story with jokes, puns and witticisms that keep you laughing as the story flies along. So let’s find out how the woman dies a lot.

Thursday Next’s been out of a job since the government closed down the Special Ops divisions. But they’re opening them back up to help burn off the surplus of stupidity that’s gathered in the country. Thursday’s up for a directorship, but there’s some other stuff going on. Her husband, Landon, is happily retired. Their son Friday was going to a great career in the Chronoguard, but with the time stream shut down, he’s just found out that he’s going to kill someone on Friday and spend the rest of his life in Jail. Their brilliant daughter Tuesday is flashing boys for money inbetween inventing new areas of math to study and working on an anti-smiting machine to block the anger of a vengeful God who’s going to Smite their hometown on Friday. Their daughter Jenny is still a mindworm that was planted and doesn’t actually exist. In addition, Thursday’s arch enemy (Goliath and their 91st evilest man Jack Schitt) are trying to worm their way into Bookworld still by creating increasingly more realistic Thursday Next robots.

I could go over the plot of the book, but the plot is pretty much a vehicle to get the characters moving around while throwing around jokes, puns and witticisms until you’re laughing to hard to notice that the plot is going around in circles. The characters,Thursday especially, crackle with wit and keep you engrossed in the book. The plot itself deals with the smiting, the robots and the impending murder in a bizarre and circular manner (as befitting the Chronoguard) that is fun in places and insane in others.

If you’ve been reading the Thursday Next book series, then you’ll love this one. If you haven’t then you’ll be lost and miss a ton of the jokes and references to previous books. It’s exciting to see how Fforde has kept the fun and insanity of the Bookworld series going without Bookworld itself. And I was happy to see that there is going to be at least one more book in the series dealing with DRM (Dark Reading Matter). Highly recommended for Fforde ffans.

This post is part of the thread: Thursday Next – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.