Permutations

I'm down in Texas at the moment, helping out with family business stuff. I've brought six books with me and already finished three. Problem? Perhaps. As you may have caught from my previous entry, I'm currently working my way through the Jane Austen books, as well as the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, and just in the last couple of days I started reading The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor. Now, if you've read all of these books, or know enough about them, you might see where I'm going with this. If not... let me enlighten you.

So, we'll begin with Thursday Next. She is currently (I'm reading book 3--The Well of Lost Plots) a Jurisfiction agent, or rather, a member of a team that enforces the law inside of books. Jurisfiction agents have to travel from book to book by means of a great library that has containing in it every version of every book that has ever been written, AND ever will be written. (Obviously they have shelves full of my stuff!) The Librarian is the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat--formerly known as the Cheshire Cat.

That would of course be the Cat from Alice in Wonderland--which The Looking Glass Wars is deviated from. Here, The Cat, as he is simply called, is a deadly assassin with nine lives--who can, on command, change into a harmless-looking kitten.

Jurisfiction headquarters is also located, by the by, in an unused ballroom at Norland Park--yes, the Norland Park, from Sense and Sensibility. And just which Austen book do you think I'm reading at the moment?

This really isn't as confusing as it sounds, I promise. I'm well able to keep them all straight in my head. But it has raised my attention about the kinds of stories I gravitate towards. While there's always a place for something new that you haven't encountered before, I find myself just as interested (if not moreso) in looking at stories I thought I already knew, examined in a different light. Sometimes radically different.

Despite it's awesome tagline--"Fantasy just declared war on reality"--I didn't think I'd particularly like The Looking Glass Wars, because I'd gotten the impression that it was an adultification of Alice in Wonderland, something like what Wicked did to Wizard of Oz, which I have to confess I just couldn't buy into at all. Extending the Oz metaphor, I'd say this is actually turning out to be something more like the Sci-Fi channel's Tin Man, a just as fantastical reimagining as the original. And while it's very, very different, it also pays a lot of respect to the original work, which is something that, as an author, is very important to me. I'll get more on a full review when I've finished it, which I don't think will be too long. This is one dang good book.