🆕 blog! “Book Review: Red Side Story - Jasper Fforde”
★★★★⯪
Fourteen years ago, I read Fforde's Shades of Grey and my life hasn't been quite the same since. It was a magical tale, almost totally devoid of exposition, building in an fantasy world like no other. Fans have been clamouring for a sequel ever since. The first few chapters of the sequel do an excellent […]
It has been a while since Shades of Gray. What I remember is that it was not what I expected from Fforde. While it had some of Ffordes humer, It was darker, sadder… It was also a dystopia with no rhyme or reason. A satire on an imagined British mix of Communism and Classism that didn't go anywhere.
Red Side Story fixes this. Eddie and Jane are trying to find out the why to this dystopia and their world will never be the same.
@jillrhudy@zkrisher@bookstodon If you are 10 DRCs behind, that is like 50 behind for the rest of us! 😊 related: why are there so many good books coming out in March?!?
Finally. The second installment in Jasper Fforde‘s „Shades of Grey“ series. It took soooo many years. Sadly Mr Fforde is not in the fediverse… #JasperFforde
Book cover - a red land with a spoon in the foreground.Fourteen years ago, I read Fforde's Shades of Grey and my life hasn't been quite the same since. It was a magical tale, almost totally devoid of exposition, building in an fantasy world like no other. Fans have been clamouring for a sequel ever since.
The first few chapters of the sequel do an excellent job of exposition - but this isn't the sort of book you can pick up without having recently read the original. I got a dozen pages into Red Side Story before I realised that I remembered nothing about the original. So I went back to read Shades of Grey. I'm delighted to say it was just as good as I remember - a delirious ride through a messed up world.
The second book is… more of the same. It slowly reveals more of the backstory and its grim origins. It builds to a rather satisfying conclusion. Along the way it gets a little tied-up in its own rules, and makes some weird pop-culture references. But never fails to be brilliantly perplexing in its structured surrealness.
In one my smarter moments I likened our era to someone arriving late to a concert, just as the final chords were hanging in the air.
If you like Fforde's inventive and bizarre worlds, you'll like this. But, I warn you, it really needs you to have read Shades of Grey first.
I love Fforde's provincial epics. They are dystopias set in the endless wastelands of suburban England. Whole new worlds brought to life in sleepy villages. The Constant Rabbit isn't exactly subtle in its politics - fears that "the Rabbits" might out-breed us leads to a rise in an anti-rabbit dictato…
A human-sized rabbit wearing a suit.I love Fforde's provincial epics. They are dystopias set in the endless wastelands of suburban England. Whole new worlds brought to life in sleepy villages. The Constant Rabbit isn't exactly subtle in its politics - fears that "the Rabbits" might out-breed us leads to a rise in an anti-rabbit dictatorship. But it is the way he deftly weaves polemic and punchline that is so delightful.
‘Rehoming rabbits in Wales’ policy was won on a slender majority and with half the country not voting at all.
The humour is daft and, on more than one occasion, near the knuckle. He lays delicious traps for the reader and is expert at revealing our culture's weird foibles.
The back-and-forth nature of the storytelling felt a little unnecessary. It almost feels like it wants to be a documentary, but ends up diminishing some of the tension. The gentle reveal of the true nature of several characters is expertly done.