I may have enjoyed this book more than the first book of either the Thursday Next series or the Nursery Crime series, and that's saying a lot.

One thing that is a little off-putting is Fforde's style of writing his novels--even the firsts--as if the reader already knows and understands the world Fforde has created. To some extent, this can be an interesting style of revelation for the reader, but I do think Fforde overdoes it.

In thinking about the book for this review, I just subtracted one star from my rating. This is because I realized how disappointed I was in the ending. Don't get me wrong, the ending was satisfying enough. For me, however, it definitely had this feeling of abruptness that completely contradicted the pacing of the rest of the novel that preceded it. This could have easily been a stand-alone story right up until the last 3 chapters (or in Fforde's case, 11 pages). It's almost as if it was going to be a stand-alone, but then someone had the brilliant idea to make it a series. Thus, the last 3 chapters were ripped out and reassembled to make that blatantly obvious.

It may have been planned as a series all along, and I am most definitely not disappointed that there will be more to explore in the universe of this book, but then that simply makes the last three chapters poorly planned and written, doesn't it?

Fforde has a very readable style, when he's not giving up such gems as, "It was a low-lying, highly fenestrated conurbation with whitewashed walls and a roofline bewhiskered with heliostats, chimney pots, and water heaters." His saving grace is that he doesn't write sentences like that as if he's overly pleased with himself for doing so. It's done more with a sense of irony... or just plain silliness.

Still, a very enjoyable book, and one that reminded me that there are worse things one can do than staying up too late to read a few more pages.