SarahJanet's Books

The Big Over Easy

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde

This was the book club pick for March in my regular original book club. (I’m now in three and it’s beginning to get a bit complicated to keep track. One is a subset of my original book club, called Electric Bookaloo, much to my amusement. The other is my YA book group. Just in case any of you are trying to write a biography about me based on my book log.)

Anyway. I’ve read and heartily enjoyed Jasper Fforde’s other books, the Thursday Next series, and this one was possibly even more entertaining. I wouldn’t classify them as the most intellectual books ever written, but they are highly readable, clever, and funny, and that’s a combination I am partial to in my reading.

This one is a story of Jack Spratt in the Nursery Crime Division, who investigates crimes that have some basis in Nursery Rhymes. In some ways it’s more accessible than Thursday Next, who works in literary crimes (I think), so those ones require a little more general knowledge about books. Nursery rhymes are much less complex, and so the little in-jokes and references that are woven through this were much less likely to escape me than the ones in Thursday Next. (I like to think I’m well read, but an online discussion about the series made me realize how much I’d missed.)

Great book, quick read, entertaining characters. Good one all around.

posted by SarahJanet @ 3:00 PM