Jasper Fforde

First Among Sequels

Thursday Next

Alexandra Mellas

How can I not adore Jasper Fforde's books? His logic driven, nonsense based, literature inspired stories consistently blow me away. This is the fifth Thursday Next adventure, and while not my favourite (what can beat The Eyre Affair?), First Among Sequels has the same mind twisting plot as its predecessors and kept me entertained.


What I Liked: The narrative is highly evocative and entertaining, full of pop culture references, witticisms and a keen detail that makes the complex plot easier to follow. 


We are faced with three Thursdays, the real world Thursday Next, Jurisfiction agent, Mother, Wife and ACME carpeter; Thursday5, Jurisfiction cadet and bookworld star of the The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco; and Thursday1-4 of the original, poorly written Thursday Next books, full of sex and violence.
Thursday5 is gentle, passive and enjoys wheatgrass, yoga and aligning her chakras, while Thursday1-4 is violent, aggressive and couldn't care less about the consequences of her thoughtless actions. 
Their interactions with each other, and with the OutWorlder Thursday, keep you on your toes comparing their similarities and their differences.


In the past, the characters Fforde has included in his bookworld have been from classics like Sense and Sensibility, or made up like Commander Bradshaw and his wife Melanie. In First Among Sequels we hear some familiar modern names including Harry Potter, and get a glimpse of Temperance Brennan from Kathy Reichs popular forensic anthropology books (does anyone else watch Bones?). It's nice to see some more of my favourites sneak into the narrative.


What I Didn't Like: I'm a sci-fi fan, I love Star Trek, Doctor Who and SG1/Atlantis/Universe, and usually I love time travel. Time travel that makes sense to me is welcome and enjoyed, whereas time travel in the Thursday Next books makes my brain ache with the chicken or the egg debate. Scrambled egg equations, time dilution, and three versions of Friday from the same timeline, and another from an alternate timeline. Lazy children, potential children and mentally implanted children make the plot even more confusing and complicated than the already twisted narrative.


To be fair, I find the time travel plot wonderfully engrossing and fascinating, I just don't have the capacity to understand it - neither does Thursday according to many of her conversations with Friday.


Now I'm looking forward to picking up the next few Thursday Next novels and to enjoy more of the BookWorld.

Jeni Enjaian

I'm sad to say that I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the others. I still really enjoyed it but not enough to give it five stars. The main problem for me was Fforde's increased inclusion of swear words. It's not like they were absent from the other books but in those he always used them to make a point, like with a particularly nasty character's name. For wordsmith as talented as Mr. Fforde, I'm disappointed. That's the main reason for the lack of a fifth star.

Other than that I loved Fforde's clever turns of phrase and manipulation of what-ifs that make his alternative universe run. Every bit of the book, besides what I mentioned above, served to further the plot and make the whole thing a ton of fun to read. As an added bonus, this book also includes Doctor Who and Bones references (aka a debate over which doctor is the best, pre-reboot, and an appearance from Temperance Brennan herself.)

I do still recommend this book and series but hope that Fforde got all of that gratuitous language out of his system with this first book in the sequel series.

Thursday Next First Among Sequels

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