I had heard about this book a few times, but nothing really specific until a couple of weeks ago when I read a review that talked about the way literature and life get mixed up together in the text. I figured that was good enough reason to give it a try.
The book was a fun read - it is highly fantastical, which requires a significant suspension of disbelief, particularly since the premise for many of the differences between the Britain of the text and the one we know is not well fleshed out. (The book is the beginning of a series, so perhaps it gets explained better later on)
*spoiler* Thursday Next works for SpecOps (short for Special Operations) in a Britain very different from today's - after WWII, the Goliath Corporation helped rebuild Britain, and in exchange, it now runs most of the country - an excellent example of the possibilities of conglomerate corporation governing multiple industries. One of the differences also lies in the continuing British fascination and love of its literature. Marlovians clash with Baconians and Shakespeareans while Bronte lovers decry the disappointing ending of Jane Eyre when Jane decides to follow John Rivers to India as his helpmate. Thursday is in pursuit of an arch criminal, Acheron Hades, who kills her partner and leaves her ill. Because people time travel (her father works for the Chronocorps) she is warned by a future self to take a job in her hometown of Swindon after leaving her unit of LiteraTecs in London. She does so, re-establishing relationships with an ex-boyfriend, and her uncle, who has invented the "proseportal" and bookworms - a combination that can send anybody into a book. There is leakage from books to reality and back as Rochester saves Thursday during an attack by Acheron and she herself entered Jane Eyre, changing the way Jane and Rochester meet by causing his horse to slip in avoiding her.
Acheron kidnaps Thursday's uncle and the portal, sending himself into Jane Eyre, but Thursday follows. Meanwhile, the Bronte society monitors the changes in the text from the lobby of an old hotel in the Republic of Wales (unfriendly to its English visitors, which Thursday has had to sneak into). Hades causes the fire and death of Bertha in our version as well as the blinding and maiming of Rochester, and Thursday provides the ghostly voice Jane hears that draws her back to Thornfield. Having improved the ending and ensured Hades death, Thursday reunites with her ex-boyfriend (engaged to another woman) with the help of Mr. Briggs (the same solicitor that broke up Rochester and Jane's wedding and who is sent out in to the world by Rochester).
The whole play with literature, the porous boundaries between the world and lit, and the thought of a world in which literature is still very much alive were all elements that delighted an egghead like me reading this book.