Dear Bookworms,
With this sixth installment of the Thursday Next series, Jasper Fforde delves once again into the complexities of the BookWorld – and shakes up all the rules. 
To begin with, the novel opens immediately upon an account of the BookWorld’s transformation from an interstellar layout to a terrestrial one with free-floating landmasses. Although at first, I found it a bit jarring to re-imagine an already-difficult conceptual arrangement, in the end it was well worth the effort. The new landscape allows for the addition of new plots, new complications, and best of all, new puns and witticisms.
Beyond the landscape, however, there exists an even bigger plot twist: the absence of our heroine. That’s right. As the title suggests, our usual mainstay and protagonist has gone missing. As a substitute, we have a fictional version of her, upon whose shoulders has fallen the weight of all that usually falls to the real Thursday, including a considerable amount of confusion.
As fictional Thursday attempts to keep up with her actual purpose (wrangling the series’ characters into delivering an accurate portrayal for Thursday’s books), she discovers that she may be the only one who can solve the mystery of where the real Thursday is. Dead? Kidnapped? Is she herself the real Thursday with memory loss? Fforde manages to balance the question of all these possibilities by taking them head on with humor, cleverness, and of course, literary gymnastics.
Since One of Our Thursdays Is Missing takes place primarily within the BookWorld, several references to other works appear throughout. The following list is provided for the benefit of those who wish to be informed ahead of time of any spoilers.
Please note that this list does not cover all materials mentioned in this book, as that list would be extremely long indeed, but only those that are crucial to the plotline of this novel or have some kind of spoiler mentioned.
Some series consist of novels which contain a common thread but can be read largely independently from one another. This is not one of those series. Fforde’s fantastical imagination builds upon his characters and setting from book to book and consequently, all titles listed for the previous novels are excluded from this list. For those lists, please see The Write Teachers reviews for The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, and First Among Sequels.
What to Read Before Reading One of Our Thursdays is Missing
1 = Significant spoilers and/or pertinence to the plot of this book.
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
2 = References that reveal something about the classic but do not affect the plot of this book.
- Stig of the Dump by Clive King
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Othello by William Shakespeare
3 = Minor remarks that probably won’t spoil too much.
- The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- A Shocking Accident by Graham Greene
- The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
- The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill
Know of any spoilers that I missed? Leave a comment below and let me know!
Keep reading!
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