Sign up
Search
Advanced search settings

Search only in certain items:

Search results
All (184)
Content
People
Apps
Books
Orbs
Movies
Music
Podcasts
Shows
Tabletop Games
Tech
TV
Video Games
YouTube Channels
Videos
    Zic Zic

    Zic Zic

    1.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

    YouTube Channel

    ZIC ZIC is a channel where we make learn colors, learning videos for preschools, kids, chilren,...

    WigglePop

    WigglePop

    (0 Ratings) Rate It

    YouTube Channel

    Looking for nursery rhymes; favorite kid songs like Finger Family; jokes; riddles; toy reviews; kid...

    Gjigandet e Vegjel

    Gjigandet e Vegjel

    (0 Ratings) Rate It

    YouTube Channel

    Gjigandet e vegjel the place where children find all their favorite nursery rhymes and songs with...

40x40

Phil Leader (619 KP) rated The Big Over Easy (Nursery Crime, #1) in Books

Nov 8, 2019  
The Big Over Easy (Nursery Crime, #1)
The Big Over Easy (Nursery Crime, #1)
Jasper Fforde | 2006
7
8.5 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
After the success of his Thursday Next books, in which the heroine can enter works of fiction and interact with the characters, Fforde dusted off a previous idea for a novel: a town where nursery rhyme characters are real. Humpty Dumpty is found in pieces at the bottom of his wall, but did he fall or was he pushed?

Investigated by detective Jack Spratt (usefully the name Jack is quite common in nursery rhymes) and his new partner Mary Mary we meet a number of characters from nursery rhymes, songs and myth and legend. As the body count rises Jack and Mary must do what all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't, and assemble the pieces of Humpty's demise to find the culprit.

The world Fforde creates - a fictional version of the town of Reading (and strongly implied to be the same world that Thursday Next lives in, in the book-within-a-book Caversham Heights) works suprisingly well, perhaps because other than the traits inherited from their nursery rhymes the characters are otherwise conventional. So Jack can't eat any fat and is destined to sell something for beans, but at the core is a straightforward detective.

This contrasts with, say, The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin which again is a detective story populated with nursery rhyme characters (and poor Humpty is again a victim, but in a very different murder) where the setting is in Toyland so doesn't have the grounding of reality that The Big Over Easy does.

The plot itself is very complex - there are red herrings, theories and suspects galore - and Fforde enjoys playing with the reader as much as with Jack. And there is of course humour aplenty, both simple gags from the story and characters and also some good knowing winks to the reader when events mirror the characters' nursery rhymes. Above all Fforde never forgets that this is after all a detective novel.

Probably not quite as good as the Thursday Next books but definitely a good read and will entertain from the first to the last page.