Last Thursday?

***SPOILER ALERT***

Jasper Fforde is one of my favourite authors. I love the Nursery Crimes series (please Jasper write another one soon!), but the first Ffordes I read were the Thursday Next books.

First Among Sequels is the fifth and latest in the Bookworld saga. Also, sadly, it distinctly had the feel of being the last - all the threads left open from earlier in the saga felt as though they were being drawn neatly together. And although at the end of the novel the Bookworld still existed, another important element - that of time travel - had been disposed of.

Although still very funny, and still equipped with all the literary jokes of previous novels, this was a much harder read - I constantly found myself (in common with some other critics) flipping back to re-check what I'd just read, and it didn't have the narrative flow that some of the earlier ones did either. I suspect that this was because the author was trying to make sure that everything was tied up by the end, so it didn't have quite the same breathless forward rush into the next novel that the earlier volumes had. This is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, because I did, but it certainly wouldn't be my favourite novel in the series - that place is reserved for the second one in the series, and the first Bookworld novel I read, Lost in a Good Book