Jasper Fforde’s novel The Well of Lost Plots is the third installment of his Thursday Next series. Thursday winds up in the Well of Lost Plots at the end of Lost in a Good Book after her husband has been eradicated by the ChronoGuard. She is taking a well-earned break inside the pages of the novel Caversham Heights. Thursday becomes a JurisFiction agent and continues her apprenticeship with Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. Thursday soon learns that life inside books is as fraught with danger as life in the Outland, and she must look out for attacks on her memory, the Mispeling Vyrus, and a pagerunning minotaur on the loose.

Thursday’s problems are not resolved at the end of The Well of Lost Plots; in fact, if you’ll pardon the pun, the plot only thickens. I felt the storyline in this book jumped around a bit, but it has some genuinely funny moments. A reviewer on Goodreads described these books as beach books for book nerds, and now that I’m trying to find that review, I can’t; however, the reviewer was correct. Book lovers will enjoy all the inside jokes, but even readers who have not read the works of literature alluded to in this series will enjoy it. It’s wildly hilarious fun, and a good “what-if” alternate history story.

I am picking up the next book in this series, Something Rotten, as my new read.