Home 
Books Movies & Music Staff Recommend... Fiction The Big Over Easy
Books Movies & Music Staff Recommend... Fiction The Big Over Easy
| 25 Dec 2009 |
|
 The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde is a humorous parody of the “hard-boiled' detective fiction genre, using characters from nursery rhymes as characters in the story. The beginning of the book finds Mary Mary, a detective sergeant from Basingstoke, being transferred to a job in Reading, Berkshire, where, much to her chagrin, she is teamed up with Jack Spratt in the Nursery Crimes Department. They soon find themselves investigating the death of Humpty Dumpty, who apparently fell off a wall, but may have met with foul play. Much of the humor and charm of the book come from the author's ability to paint these nursery rhyme characters as actual three-dimensional people, giving them sufficient depth to be interesting while maintaining a sense of whimsy. A pun or a silly joke is always lurking just around the corner, but they're integrated so well into the prose that they never really take you out of the story. If you are at all a fan of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, or if you just enjoy a sort of tongue-in-cheek humor that walks a fine line between serious and ridiculous, I highly recommend The Big Over Easy.
|
Comments
RSS feed for comments to this post