One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde, 359 pages

This is the latest installment in Fforde's Thursday Next series, which is, in a word, weird. Thursday is a woman living in an alternate-universe 1980s England in which dodos are popular re-engineered pets, Name That Fruit! is a popular TV game show and there's a whole police division devoted to solving literary crime. Thursday's one of those LiteraTecs, as they're called, but she has the ability to read herself into books, solve crime within the even weirder world of fiction and, since she has fictional books written about her, interact with the written Thursday.

All that said, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing is the first of the TN books that follows written Thursday instead of the "real" Thursday. Mainly because the "real" Thursday is the one referred to in the title. Maybe it's because the heroine of this book is not the Thursday I've grown to love, but I found One of Our Thursdays Is Missing to be even more confusing than your average Fforde book (which is saying something).

As usual, Fforde's writing is peppered with geeky clever humor and so much creativity that my mind is still trying to figure it all out. As a long-time fan of Fforde's writing, I know I'll read this one again. And I'm sure that next time it will make a tad bit more sense and I'll catch even more of Fforde's silly jokes.