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The Eyre Affair

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The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Format: Book, eBook
Who it’s for: Adults

The Eyre Affair introduces Thursday Next, a literary detective living in a parallel universe with a time traveling father and an uncle experimenting with literal bookworms. Thursday works for SpecOps 27, the division that investigates manuscript forgeries and other literary crimes. The Eyre Affair sees Thursday battling with literary villain Acheron Hades. Hades has stolen the Prose Portal, allowing him to enter manuscripts and kidnap characters for ransom. He starts with Martin Chuzzelwit, but his ultimate goal is to remove Jane Eyre from the pages of Jane Eyre. If he succeeds, Jane will be removed from all copies of the novel. It’s up to Thursday to stop him and save Jane Eyre. 

The first book in the Thursday Next series (there are seven in total), The Eyre Affair immerses the reader in Thursday’s alternate universe. The Crimean War never ended, Russia still has a tsar, and cloning animals is widespread (Thursday’s pet is a dodo v1.2 named Pickwick). This sets the stage for the rest of the series – we learn in the second book about the BookWorld, occupied by literary characters with its own police force (Jurisfiction). 

For readers with an interest in classic literature (Fforde constantly drops in references to classic novels and poems) and inventive, sometimes absurd alternate realities, The Eyre Affair is a fun and exciting introduction to a great series.

Find The Eyre Affair in the catalog.

Dread Nation

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Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Format: Book

Who’s It for: Teens

In which I find myself surprisingly entertained…

Dread Nation, an alternate historical fiction, is not a genre I usually read yet I thoroughly enjoyed this tale. Set in the time of the civil war, the is told from the perspective of Jane, a house slave who has been sent to Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls. While at schools the girls learn how to be attendants to wealthy women and also how to quickly and efficiently dispatch Shamblers, which are zombies.

I am not a fan of zombies but in Dread Nation, they aren’t the focal point. It was the relationships between the cast of characters, the engaging action scenes and Jane’s sarcastic humor that truly held my attention. Jane is a spitfire who believes in telling it like she sees it but she’s also smart enough to know when to play the role of a submissive slave. This makes her perfect as the books voice. Each chapter is preceded by a short letter from Jane to her beloved mother, revealing a softer, more vulnerable side of Jane that is usually tucked away. The titles of the chapters are her short and often amended perspective on the events about to unfold.

The author does a good job of addressing and balancing the racial prejudice that was prevalent during this time period while still making this is fun story of survival, friendship and mayhem.

Find it in the catalog.