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How often does a popular series switch-out the protagonist in Book 6?
I can't think of another example.

Jasper Fforde is a very clever, imaginative, witty and playful writer. Books 1-3 in this Thursday Next series are brilliant. Book 4 was very good, but not quite as sparkling. Book 5, the last in the series before this, was the weakest by a considerable margin. It felt... flatter than what had gone before.

"Has he lost it?" I worried.
"Does this mark the beginning of the end?" I fretted.

Then came his marvellous Shades of Grey (not part of this series) - unfortunately released just prior to the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon, making it the most retrospectively the worst titled book in years (sorry, Jasper). Regardless of the title, that book is a peach - very different to his usual style, but a real gem.

But still I found myself nervous returning to the Thursday Next series - I ordered this one in and my wife started reading it, but she couldn't get into it and dropped out after 100 pages or so (but she is pregnant again and has the attention span of a gnat with ADHD).

So at Chapter 1, I was sceptical.
Then I realised that he'd switched-out the protagonist - which made me more sceptical, it seemed a bit of a gamble, an admission that he'd run out of ideas with Thursday and needed to do something big to freshen it up.

I mean - can you imagine Rowling focusing a book on a random character like Luna's POV? Or Butcher doing a Dresden file about Sanya?

What allows Fforde to get away with it is the specifics of the trade, his layered conceptual world-building, and a certain amount of sheer ballsiness.

The Thursday Next books are all about book-hopping. Being able to jump into the world of a book, and the world of the Great Library that links them all together. In OoOTIM (which doesn't exactly flow as an acronym), Fforde reboots the 'book world' into a whole globe of genre islands, rather than a symbolic library. And then he takes the idea that someone has written books about the adventures of Thursday Next, which means there is now a Real Thursday, and the Fictional Thursday who 'acts' her in the book. The main plot of this book is the idea that the Real Thursday has gone missing, and Fictional Thursday is drawn into her world, trying to track her down, and - as nobody can tell them apart - impersonating Real Thursday to try save the day.

There's a fair amount of identity crisis played - I am a really Fictional Thursday, or am I Real Thursday who thinks she's Fictional Thursday?

But there's also a rather wonderful meta-text spin thing going on. It's clear at the beginning that the books about Real Thursday which have been written within the universe, which Fictional Thursday 'acts' in, are not the same books which we, the readers, have read up to this point. So we've got multiple layers of 'Thursday's Story' - but Fictional Thursday is, by various means, making changes to the story she acts, to make them closer to the 'truth' of the versions we've read. If that sounds like a head-spinner, when I got the gist of where he was going with it (the Toast Marketing Board!) it put a delighted smile on my face.

I'm not sure how well I've conveyed the cleverness - but the overall tone and style is playful and witty - near death experience via mime, pompous dodo, clockwork butler sidekick, the real name of Jack Schitt... there's a lot of good scenes to carry the clever ideas.

So yeah. If you've never read any Thursday Next books - don't start here - but if you dropped the series after Book 5 (like me) - please take this as a hearty reassurance that the man has got his mojo back.

After this I read: The Long Goodbye