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tcplnyteens · 4 years

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The Eyre Affair By Jasper Fforde

Alright, alright you caught me. I did have an ulterior motive for reading Jane Eyre. I would like to think I would be totally willing to pick up any book by the Brontë sisters or Charles Dickens and be happily entertained for the next few days. However, some of these books can be rather a slog, so it helps to have another reason to want to read them.

And I found one such reason.

Special Operative Thursday Next lives in an England that is despotic in its adherence to literary perfection. In this world people go so far to form religions over who they believe truly wrote Shakespeare and are willing to kill for their beliefs. Thursday isn’t just any special operative — she works for SpecOps 27, or as some people refer to these agents, she’s a LiteraTec. It is her job to find any forgeries or any other literary crime that might be committed.

There is some debate over what the upper levels of the SpecOps do. There’s Level 12, the ChronoGuard — the intrepid heroes who protect time — and all the way up to SpecOps 1, but no one talks about what they do.

Thursday’s rather monochromatic life is interrupted by a SpecOps 5 agent who recruits her to help find an old teacher of hers, Acheron Hades. Hades is pure evil — killing, stealing, and murdering for fun. And he has an evil plan to make England to make him the richest man on earth. He also is particularly skilled. Hades is impervious to bullets, can disguise himself as almost anything, and most important, can hear his own name if it is spoken out loud.

The SpecOps 5 agent and Thursday try to catch Hades as he obtains an original manuscript of a famous Charles Dickens novel, but everything to wrong and Thursday finds herself shot and bleeding to death in an alley.

When she finally comes back into conscienceless, two rather strange things happen. One; she is told that a strange man helped save her in the alley as she lay dying, and two; she gets a visit from her future self in a sports car.

Yes, this book is as quirky as it sounds. (Case in point, Thursday has a dodo bird named Pickwick which she make from one of the many genetic cloning kits anyone can pick up from the corner store.)

But what does this have to do with Jane Eyre? Don’t worry, I’m getting there!

Well, Thursday’s uncle has created a Prose Portal, or in other words, a way to enter a story and experience it just like you were there. However, Hades finds out that if he takes the original manuscript of a story, removes a character from it and kills that character, that book and every copy ever of that book is changed forever.

So yes, you can guess what manuscript Hades goes after. He sends his henchmen into Jane Eyre to kidnap the title character and bring her back for ransom, and ultimately, murder.

Can Thursday save Jane? Will the entire story be rewritten? How did she visit herself in the past? Who was that man who saved her in the alley?

Hint: It really helps to have read Jane Eyre before reading this book!

The quirky humor and literary references might be slightly confusing at times, but that just lends to an even grander sense of pride when you actually understand the references. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes unusual but very cleverly written books.

Happy reading!

~ Trispin

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