Shades of Grey

So I dorked out about Jasper Fforde weeks ago, and am now getting to reviewing his new book, Shades of Grey. Here is the dilemma folks. I loved this book. But I didn't, throwing books at customers because they dared to mention a book with Eyre in the title love it. Okay, that's a true story, poor customers, poor coworkers, though the coworker it happened to is now reading the series... Shades of Grey follows Eddie Russet as he and his father are banished to the outer fringes of their world after a prank gone bad. The thing about their world is that most people can only see one color, Eddie is a red, pretty low on the social scale, but he can see a lot of red... See? It was easier when the Prince of Denmark was showing up in London lamenting about Ophelia, that was easy for me to understand (Something Rotten), or Jack Sprat and Mary Mary are solving Humpty Dumpty's murder (The Big Over Easy). Well, anyone, Eddie's greatest ambition is to marry some chick who has a long lineage of being high red seers, but then of course he meets Jane, a Grey (Jane Grey, okay, that's a little dorky funny), and figures out that this society based on arbitrary rules and the obsession over seeing colors is ridiculous. I know someone who likes this book better than the Thursday books. To which I believe I called him a moron, but he made a valid point, these are classic Fforde characters, rich, interesting and funny, but this book is more Sci-fi-y than the others. Fforde has created a world completely different from ours in this one (though, you'll have to admit, a land where Ms. Havisham is working for a kind of policing agency is a little different, and AWESOME), and for me, at least, the plot gets lost in creating this world. But Eddie, Jane and the rest of the cast of characters were good enough to make this a good book. Like a solid B+ instead of his consistent A+'s. I think that now that I understand the Grey world, I'll like the next book better (though the next book he's writing is Thurs book, so yeah!). A highly recommended book if you like SciFi, a pretty highly recommended book if you just like interesting novels.