About This Review
I used to review all the books I read back when I was an active book blogger. Not all of the reviews were good or interesting. However, my review of The Big Over Easy still gets likes and upvotes almost 10 years after I wrote it so I thought I’d share it again.
5 Things To Know Before Reading This Book
- It is a murder mystery.
- The victim is an enormous egg named Humpty Dumpty. (He fell off a wall … or was pushed or possibly shot.)
- The detective investigating the crime is named Jack Spratt. His partner is Mary Mary.
- Jack and Mary work for the Nursery Crimes Division (NCD).
- You should brush up on your nursery rhymes and fairy tales before reading to fully enjoy the book. (It took me almost halfway through to dredge up the fact that Jack’s tendency to accidentally off “unusually tall people” was a reference to Jack The Giant Killer.)
4 Other Stories/Tales/Myths Referenced in the Book
- The Three Little Pigs
- Jack and the Beanstalk
- Old Mother Hubbard
- Wee Willie Winkie
…plus lots lots more.
3 Things I Thought While Reading The Book
- “Gosh, I just love it when an author has a whimsical and witty sense of humor and isn’t afraid to just have fun.”
- I’m sure I’m missing about 25% (and possibly even more) of the jokes and references in this book. But who cares? It is cracking me up anyway.”
- “Jasper Fforde is kind of a hottie. And he’s smart too.” (Seriously, go Google Jasper Fforde. He’s cute!!)
2 Excerpts I Had To Highlight and Share
Excerpt 1:
“…Father liked word games. He was fourteen times world Scrabble champion. When he died, we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score. He spent the greater part of his life campaigning to have respelt those words that look as though they are spelt wrongly but arent.”
“Such as….?”
“Oh, skiing, vacuum, freest, eczema, gnu, diarrhea, that sort of thing. He also thought that ‘abbreviation’ was too long for its meaning, that ‘monosyllable’ should have one syllable, ‘dyslexic’ should be renamed ‘O’ and ‘unspeakable’ should be respelt ‘unsfzpxkable.’”
Excerpt 2:
Mr. Pewter led them through to a library, filled with thousands of antiquarian books.
“Impressive, eh?”
“Very,” said Jack. “How did you amass all these?”
“Well,” said Pewter, “you know the person who always borrows books and never gives them back?”
“Yes….?”
“I’m that person.”
1 Last Thing
I think that you’re either the type of person who likes books like this or you aren’t. Therefore, I’m sure the three possible reactions to this review are:
- “This book sounds aggressively silly and whimsical and that is not my cup of tea at all!”
- “I need to read this immediately!”
- “What the heck took you so long to read Jasper Fforde, Jenners? Haven’t we been telling you how awesome he is for a while now?”
A funny, cerebral book with lots of wordplay, silliness and wit to entertain adults. Do not mistake this for a children’s book. It is too smart for that!
