There's this one moment where the story is offering a convenient in-narrative reason why (nearly) all the characters come from Victorian fiction and I'm obviously sitting here yelling "It's Mickey Mouse's fault" because I am well acquainted with the role that copyright plays in the life of the English scholar.
A few comments:
1) When there is a significant time-lag between when *I* put all the information together and when the characters do, I get annoyed. This book had that and I spent a lot of time yelling "come ON!" at Rob. I appreciated what Parry was doing, but there are definite debut novel plot kinks, mostly pacing. Ehh, it's a first novel thing.
2) There was George Eliot erasure here and as someone who HATED David Copperfield and thinks that roughly two thirds of everything Dickens has written is overrated, I MAY have had some feelings about the focus of the book.
3) The term I'm grasping for here is the narcissism of small differences. Because I read Victorian literature, because I think about it slightly differently than Parry, there's a lot of this book that felt like "yes, but!" for me.
4) This was fine, but Jasper Fforde did it better? Is that mean? That's kind of mean, but I feel like I spent a lot of this book reading it and remembering my first encounter with The Eyre Affair.