The Well of Lost Plots - Jasper Fforde

The Well of Lost Plots is the third installment of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. I'll admit it...when I began this book, I honestly didn't even think I was going to be able to finish it! I jumped into this series on this book and really should have taken the time to read the first two. It would have made this book make sense from the beginning, but even without all that back story, once you get into the swing of how things are done in the Book World, it's a really good read.

This book, and the rest in the series, have an incredibly complex story-line, but I'll do my best to summarize for you:

A little background on Thursday:
Thursday Next was introduced in the first book of this series, The Eyre Affair, as a literary detective who rescues a kidnapped Jane Eyre and returns her to the Emily Bronte novel, with a surprise ending of course! She then teams up with Miss Havisham from Great Expectations to stop an evil villain who has escaped into the Outland in Lost In A Good Book. Somewhere in those two novels, her husband, Landen, is eradicated. Another evil villain, or maybe the same evil villain, travels back in time, killing Landen in his childhood and leaving Thursday Next pregnant with a baby who's father never technically existed. To make matters worse, Thursday is having her dreams and memories invaded by Aornis, a mnemonoporph and sister of Hades, who is changing and erasing those memories of Landen.

Onto the book!
In The Well of Lost Plots, a home for un-published and half-finished stories, a pregnant Thursday is trying to have a little down time. She's set up shop in a houseboat in Caversham Heights, a detective novel so bad, it's on the verge of being dissassembled and thrown into the Text Sea.

Working part time as "Mary", the lead in Caversham Heights, and part time as a Jurisfiction agent, along with Miss Havisham and Beatrice from Dante's Inferno, ensuring that things in the Book World are regulated so that reading is not disrputed in the Outland.

During all of this, the Book World is almost ready to launch Ultra Word, "the greatest advancement since the invention of movable type", revolutionizing the way we read.

Something goes terribly wrong however, and Tursday and Miss Havisham find themselves chasing an escaped minotaur, loose gramasites, and the mispeling vyrus through various books and trying to find out who set them free in the first place, and why.

I don't want to give too much away, but there are some seriously evil people in that Book World.

It's really a unique book and I'm sure series of books. Never before have I read anything like this and once you're able to actually get into it and understand how the Book World works, it's downright charming. Definitely check it out!

Jasper Fforde's Site