In Jasper Fforde’s sixth Thursday Next book, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, the author does a fun trick of having the star of the book be the title character and not be the title character at the same time. In this book, we follow the adventures of the written Thursday Next, not the real Thursday Next. If this makes sense to you, then you’re probably familiar with Fforde’s fun literary tweaking series and are already looking forward to the book. If you’re confused, then don’t worry, it isn’t as confusing as it sounds. So, which Thursday is missing?

The written version of Thursday Next is worried because she thinks the real version of Thursday Next is missing. She is also not getting along with her co-stars in the novels and is looking for an understudy to help out when she goes out on assignment for JAID (Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department). JAID isn’t as prestigious as the real Thursday’s Jurisfiction assignment, but at least her boss thinks her incompetent. Written Next realizes this when her boss puts her on to investigate an accidental book crash. As the investigation starts pointing out that it wasn’t really an accident, Next realizes that her boss asked her to investigate since he didn’t believe she could actually do it. Now she has to investigate the crash without bringing attention to herself and hold back a rebellion insider her book.

In the rest of Fiction island (as the BookWorld was remade during a 9 minute span into a more geographical place) there is war brewing as Racy Novel is making threats and Jurisfiction really needs the real Thursday Next at the conference. But they might have to settle for a quiet written Thursday Next to show up to lend some gravitas to their side of the proceedings. Written Next has to go into the real world to investigate and find out where real Thursday is and try to solve the book accident while the cases start blending into each other.

Overall this was a fun quick read. This book isn’t quite as good as the earlier Thursday Next books, but by focusing on a different Thursday Next, Fforde has made the book different and interesting while keeping it the same as well. If you enjoy word play and playing with literature and literary characters, then this is the series for you. Start at the beginning (otherwise you’ll get lost in BookWorld) and when you end up here, you’ll enjoy the book. Recommended.

This post is part of the thread: Thursday Next – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.