Mount Toberead 6: The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde

How did this one even wind up on Mount Toberead? The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde's debut and the first book in the Thursday Next series) is one of my all time favourite books. I've read it many times and enjoy it every time. The two sequels (Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots) were worthy successors and together make a wonderful trilogy. That is however where it should have ended. There can be too much of a good thing, and the Thursday Next books have been becoming less and less entertaining, beginning with the 4th book of the series (Something Rotten), there have been 3 books since Something Rotten.

Jasper Fforde hasn't written another Thursday Next book since The Woman Who Died a Lot, that was in 2012, and while there is a note in the back that Thursday will return, there hasn't been anything forthcoming. I kind of hope there isn't, because Thursday Next has become the sort of series that lives on past glories and has gone to the well too many times, only to find it dry.

Some of my most loved things about the books were the Bookworld and Thursday's Uncle Mycroft. Neither are present in The Woman Who Died a Lot. Fortunately Thursday still has her pet dodo Pickwick, but there's not enough of the extinct bird, either.

By now the jokes have become stale and strained. The characters behave illogically, they've always been silly, but that was in keeping with the sheer weirdness of the reality they lived in, in this book and the previous one, it just seemed off. There's a great deal of deus ex machina at work here, so readers know that the characters aren't in any real peril, because they'll find some magical way out of whatever situation they find themselves in. This kills tension and detracts from the narrative itself. The situation of Thursday's son Friday was one of the most interesting, but even that ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

To be honest, and it hurts to say this, but The Woman Who Died a Lot could have stayed on the mountain and I wouldn't be any the poorer for not having read it.