"The Big Over Easy" By Jasper Fforde

I read this with my book club. We were looking for something light to read. While I found the references to nursery rhymes and other stories/subtitle suggestions to be clever, I found the writing style to be sort of distracting. I finally got use to it 1/3-1/2 of the way through the book and fell into a reading rhythm from there. The newspaper clippings at the beginning of each chapter were sometimes relevant, sometimes funny, and other times annoying since they didn't add to the story. Overall, I was happy with the main story and I'd read a sequel probably. I'd say that everyone in the book club had fun with the book whether they liked it or not.

A very secondary character in the book was the 1 year old son of Inspector Jack Spratt (a main character). The boy, Stevie, really had nothing to do with the main story, but since I currently have a 1 year old, I found these lines in the book to be amusing and true-to-life:

“Da-woo!” screamed Stevie, waving a spoon as he scattered food around the room, much to the pleasure of the cat, with whom, it was generally agreed, Stevie had an “understanding.”

“Da-woo!!” yelled Stevie, jumping up and down. In the absence of anything more productive to do, he grasped large handfuls of scrambled egg and squeezed until it oozed between his fingers like yellow toothpaste.

Stevie then stared at Prometheus with all the seriousness that one-year-olds can muster, which is quite a lot. “Da-woo,” he said at length.

Stevie screamed “Da-woo!” enthusiastically and hurled his spoon on the floor because he could.