Something Rotten

I love this story line. I love the characters, and the inclusion of literary Easter eggs all throughout. There are just bits and pieces that really annoy me. It started in the well of lost plots with the extreme lack of pregnancy knowledge and then little bits and bobs in this one just seemed lacking depth. The whole superhoop thing seemed really random, not random chaotic in the way this series excites me, but random like the author couldn't think of what to make the backbone of the story so he went with a sports game because nothing else came to mind. A lot of stuff was written as afterthoughts. Like oh yeah I forgot about this bit, let's stick it in here. Her coming back to life at the end was absurdly predictable and kind of annoying honestly. How many people can they get to take her place? Spike! Poor Spike. He could have been such a great complicated character but he was so 1 dimensional. He turns Thursday down to date this random woman that he falls in love with and she seems great in the previous book but she turns out to be super whiney in this book. The whole window maker thing was another author cop-out. ‘Couldn't figure out what to do here, so let's make her Spikes wife.' And then when she's kicks the bucket he just goes with it? No. That's inhuman.

The ending really got me though. I was possibly sobbing.

But I'm really kinda pissed about Bowden. Where the heck is he at the end? And there's this theme since book one “I'm gonna marry that woman.” But like she just pops in after 2 years and everyone just acts like she was there last week. And Fforde even touched on the romance so briefly with the Neanderthal telling him about how Bowden is ‘not able to be with the woman you truly love.' But Gran says Thursday is with Landon for over 40 years. What was even up with that fortune telling? Geez I really hope the author uses that in the upcoming books because what a waste.

Ugh. Why did I want Fforde to kill off Landon so bad? I felt like it was what I would have wrote honestly. Like it was required to happen for the story to be told.

Bringing up the pregnancy thing again, I realize Fforde is a guy, but he has literally no idea what it's like to be a mom at all.


Where the hell did Mycroft and Polly come from?! At the end of the Eyre Affair it said -and she never saw them again- which really bothered me at the time because I really thought they really made the book so great. I love the going through books thing, but I wanted more crazy ingenuity. Still, the ‘oh yeah Mycroft and Polly came back after we did some random bit we're not actually going to tell you about, but it was crazy, you should have been there.'