The Big Over Easy

Jasper Fforde is a master at creating utterly fantastic yet completely logical worlds and societal structures, like this one where detectives are ranked and murders solved based on how the write-up will read. “The Big Over Easy” is not quite as engrossing as the Thursday Next books, but it still has the Fforde wit and fun.

Apparently the last time I read this was pre-goodreads! That helped me not remember much!

Jasper Fforde is one of those authors I know I love, but never really want to pick back up, but then when I do I wonder why it's been so long! This is a fun detective story using nursery rhyme characters as characters all around. It's really well done, though the reveal was a bit convoluted - but I think it was sort of supposed to be? So much fun.

Detective parody populated by nursery rhyme and fairytale characters.

It is similar to the Thursday Next series but Fforde narrowed this one down to a couple genres rather than using all of literature. Where Thursday Next will have a million different plots to balance, this one had a million different twists. It must be exhausting to be a Fforde protagonist.

Fforde excels at taking something that sounds silly and populating with well-developed characters to give it depth and make it believable. As usual, the targets of Fforde's humor are bureaucracy, capitalism, and the media and how much bureaucracy serves the other two.