by Jasper Fforde
Fforde books are insanely difficult to classify and tend to end up in literary fantasy with Lewis Carroll and C.S Lewis. I'm more familiar with his other two series and wasn't even aware this book was out. Imagine a sort of Orwellian world where the paramount importance was a person's type and strength of color perception. A whole society arranged around chromatic perception with social rules organized in a rigid hierarchy. Imagine too, that all medicine was administered through the visual cortex and came on color swatches...like in a paint store color swatches. Now imagine that young Edward, an untested but strong red percever, get's dropped in the middle of a conspiracy along with his swatchman (doctor) father. And of course, there's a girl. There's always a girl.
Most of the book is presented as a sort of extended flashback while Edward is head first in the belly of a carnivorous tree. It is all handled with an unusual amount of adept finesse. Normally extended flashbacks are jarring and unpleasant. It's difficult to manage a POV where the narrator knows how it's going to work out, especially when, in the last 50 pages of a 380 page book, it suddenly pops out of the flashback and into the current time-stream. Well done and as it turns out not jarring at all.
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