Lost in a Good Book is the second Thursday Next book by Jasper Fforde. [Here’s my review of The Eyre Affair.]

Plot [with slight SPOILERS for the Eyre Affair]:
Three months after the events in the Eyre Affair, Thursday is happily married to Landen and enjoys her work for the Swindon SpecOps. That is precisely the moment, her time-travelling father chooses to show up to tell her that the world was going to end (in pink goo no less) and that he had no idea how to stop it. And then the Goliath corporation decides that to get Thursday to help them retrieve their employee Jack Schitt from a copy of Poe’s The Raven they need pressure. So they eradicate Landen (who from then on died when he was two) but leave Thursday’s memories of him intact. As if that wasn’t enough on her plate, Thursday finds a copy of Shakespeare’s lost Cardenio, is hunted by strange coincidences, discovers that she can actually enter books on her own, gets drafted into the inner-literature police force, Jurisfiction and apprenticed to Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. Oh, and Thursday’s pregnant.

As in all other Fforde books the level of detail and brilliant throwaway remarks* is absolutely staggering in Lost in a Good Book. Fforde’s weak point is and remains the plotting, though it’s already better here than in The Eyre Affair. But it’s a weakness easily forgiven when the story just whisks you along and the characters make you fall in love with them over and over again.

It’s been a while that I have read the series and the details of the books keep bleeding together. Interestingly enough, though, most of what I remember (and remember most fondly) seems to come from Lost in a Good Book. The coincidences, the whole thing with the pink goo, the trial, …

Thursday continues to be a wonderful character. And even though Landen’s erdication hurts like hell (because he’s awesome), he’s not completely gone and it’s also made up for by Miss Havisham and the Cheshire Cat. Also Mycroft’s disappearance is a little consolidated by Granny Next, even though she only gives a short guest play. [That is one crazy-great family.]

And I had completely forgotten that Joffy was gay! It feels like I never knew in the first place…

The book is not really self-contained. The ending, taken on its own, is much too open and I’m not sure that you’d understand everything if you hadn’t read the Eyre Affair before. It also feels like Fforde changed a bit of how his world works between the two books – though, since I’m always in a pleasant state of confusion when he starts to explain exactly how everything works, this might be a wrong impression.

Summarising: a more than worthy follow-up.

Also this has to be one of my favorite moments in all of book-writing:

“Anything is possible right now. We’re in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement.”
“We’re in a what?”
“We’re in a pseudoscientific technobabble.”
“Ah! One of those.”

—

*Like the sudden appearance of Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft and its explanation in the Next-verse.