Book #17 – The Eyre Affair

Prompt – A book with a book on the cover

Medium – Book

About the Book – Thursday Next is a literatec (literature detective) in Special Ops in an alternate version of the UK. The book is set in the 1980s, where England is a republic, technology in some realms is not as advanced (i.e. they have airships!), there are time-travelling policemen, vampires and werewolves and where books and literature is significantly more important in day-to-day life than it is in this world. Thursday begins the book working in London for SO-27 (the literature crime department), before transferring to the same department in Swindon, where the majority of the book takes place. The main storyline in the novel involves the heroine pursuing a dangerous and demonic master criminal through the world of Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’.

My Rating – 9.5/10. I really enjoyed this book. I was not necessarily sure going into it, as I’m not a massive fan of surrealist literature and my husband had not enjoyed the series when he had read it, but I loved it! Some of the things I really enjoyed were:

1. The puns and in-jokes in the naming of characters, such as Landon Park-Laine (Land on Park Lane, like in Monopoly!).
2. All the links to classic literature – Jane Eyre, obviously, but also some of Dickens’ work, Shakespeare, poets.
3. The ‘alternate’ nature of the setting – I love anything Steampunk, so that was a big winner, but also the clever little twists which made the setting close to our world, but not quite.
4. The comedy – I found this book in places really funny.
5. The main character – Thursday is fantastic. An ex-soldier, a special ops agent, she is always heading into danger and always ready with a quick quip. She is also very relatable – she suffers an accident early in the book and talks about how she cries a lot in private, which is very un-like the strong female characters you sometimes read about.
6. The storyline – I just liked the cleverness of it. The loose ends for the next novel, the clever ‘Easter Eggs’ for other books and the ways that it all came together in the end were great.

Would I read it again? Definitely. I’ve already added the next books in the series to my ‘read in the future’ list!