The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Close the prose portal, the worms are about to start hyphenating!

Hey! Everyone! This is a pretty awesome literature nerd's playground. :)

I kinda expected something like a UF first-person mystery novel with magical elements where characters jump out of the pages of books and make a mess of things, or vice-versa, where we jump in and make a hash of a perfectly good story, but I didn't expect the novel to have a lot of complicated character elements in our main characters, a nicely complicated plot that continues to twist and turn through a LOT more than just the Bronte Society or Jane, herself.

And what might be better? Oh, the whole World-Building of the Spec-Ops and the very interesting alternate dimension physics, the whole spy networks associated with missing manuscripts, the Shakespeare Conspiracy, and a (literarily) enormous amount of Lit-Nerd In-Jokes not limited only to conversation, but built right into the world we're thrown into.

So is it fantasy, SF (Come on, plasma beams and jumping dimesions lol), a dream of an Editorial Superman or the Wish Fulfilment of every Writer Who Is Also A Fan? Could be it's all of the above. :)

This is some really cool fun that reads like a mystery turned into a spy novel, full of magical and SF moments, and a huge focus on characters. What's not to love?

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