The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde - Book Review

Jasper Fforde is the author of the bestselling Thursday Next series, and now, in this book, he starts a new series, Nursery Crime. If you haven’t read his Thursday Next series, and love the old classics, you’ll love that series. It starts with The Eyre Affair and I highly recommend it! I was able to really enjoy it even though I haven’t read all of the classics he references in the series (although I have read a pretty big chunk of them).

If you aren’t a fan of the classics, but still enjoy literary humor, then Ffordes new series is perfect for you. Its based in the same alternate England as his Thursday Next series, but instead of meeting characters from classics like Jane Eyre, we get to meet people from the nursery rhymes we grew up with.

Jack Spratt is the head of the Nursery Crime Division in Reading, England. If the crime involves a nursery rhyme, he’s the one who investigates it, along with his understaffed motley crew of a department. Now you might think that these type of crimes would be rare, but all your old favorites have lives in the real world, although they usually don’t realize that they are from nursery rhymes. In fact neither Jack Spratt himself, nor his new partner Mary Mary, realize that they have their origins in nursery rhymes, despite the fact that they investigate them.

In The Big Over Easy Jack Spratt and Mary Mary are called on to solve the murder of Humpty Dumpty. Mary is new to the Nursery Crime Division (NCD) and it’s all still a bit strange to her, and she couldn’t have had that much stranger of a first case to tackle! Not that it seems that way at first, when you find an egg shattered at the base of a wall the apparent cause of death would seem to be death by falling right? Then they find the bullet hole. Then, over the course of the investigation, multiple people come forward to confess, each convinced they really did it, and things just get stranger from there.

I give this book 5 out of 5 cups of coffee. I was laughing the whole way through and I love how Fforde brings our old friends from nursery rhymes to life, and gives them a whole new twist! It was also fun to see some characters from his other series get mentioned and one even plays a pivotal part. I can hardly wait to read the next book!

A Gateway to Dreams - The Worlds of Anne McCaffrey

Great writers are the one’s who write characters that you feel that you know as well as your best friend, create worlds that you can close your eyes and imagine, and put problems in their books that will keep you up until three in the morning because you can’t go to bed until know how everything turns out.


I have always been a dreamer, it’s a large part of why I write, and I am also an insomniac. Consequently, I started telling myself stories to go to sleep at night at a very young age. Sometimes this is counter productive, but more often I would dream of riding the Black Stallion, traveling to Narnia hand in hand with Lucy, or marrying Wesley Crusher (Yes, I am a geek), and slowly but surely my day dreams would lead to real dreams.

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One of the my favorite authors of all time is Anna McCaffrey. I spent many hours dreaming that I was Menolly (from the Harper Hall Trilogy), running away after being permanently injured by my family, raising a nest full of fire-lizards, and eventually finding out that I’d still be able to make music. If I wasn’t dreaming I was Menolly, I was dreaming I was with her at Harper Hall, or some other Pern-based series. I devoured her books, both the Dragonriders of Pern, and her many other works that are just as fantastic.


Which is why, when I heard this afternoon that Anne McCaffrey passed away yesterday from a stroke while at home in Ireland, I literally sat at my computer and cried.

Anne McCaffrey was a pioneer among writers. It is because of her ground breaking work that there are so many women writing fantasy and science fiction today. According to Tor.com she “was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction, the first woman to win a Nebula Award, and the first author to hit the New York Times bestseller list with a SF title (The White Dragon).

Over the course of her career, Anne McCaffrey wrote literally dozens of books, and from all accounts, has done a lot to encourage the writers of today. She stayed active in the field, even though at 84 she was slowing down. You can read her biography at The Worlds of Anne McCaffrey, and if you want to catch up on the books you missed check Fantastic Fiction. If you’ve never read her work I’d recommend starting with Dragon Song, but I have to admit I’m a little biased since that’s the first one I read.

To Anne McCaffrey, queen among the dragonriders, beloved author to many, you will be missed.


~Ruthie~