Shades of Grey

Another Lenten season without movies. And so you, dear reader, are going to have to deal with book reviews instead of any movie reviews for the next 40 days. Unless, of course, I review a movie I watched before Ash Wednesday. Which I guess I could do. Hmmm... Well, until I do that:

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde


OK, I'm not an objective reader here -- Jasper Fforde is my favorite living author -- but this was a lot of fun to read. Not as brilliant as the first few Thursday Next novels, or even the first of the Nursery Crimes, but still I think this series has a ton of potential. It's a zany world of colorblind people, where social caste is based on how much and which color you can see. Also a mildew that is the cause of death for each and every person. Also an antiquated system of marrying for rank, not love. Also Apocryphal people, and highly regulated paint shops, and animals born with bar codes to identify themselves. Jasper Fforde is also one of the few people I can think of who could pull off writing such a funny, comedic book that ends, rather than with a happy couple and Good overcoming Evil, with a sham marriage and deaths of several important characters. And yet I still loved it.

I'm such a pushover for Fforde that I'll give this 4 out of 4 stars, even though I've read better from him, and there were some passages that were a bit stilted (this is by far his most complicated alternate reality yet -- explaining the rules to a colorblind society that can still produce artificial color that everyone can see gets a bit convoluted at times).