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Originally Posted by gmw
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. It's really hard to describe this, or to rate it. The alternative history is generally light and humorous in nature (villains enjoying their villainy, puns and poking fun at current standards), but at other times is quite dark and serious (war and loss). Our protagonist, Thursday Next, is a literature detective, and it seems they take their literature very seriously in this alternative world. There is time manipulation, weird physics, characters falling in and out of stories. It is all such an a strange and apparently conflicting mix of things that it should be a mess, and at times it comes close to that, but somehow Fforde manages to push it all into a coherent and enjoyable story. I ended up giving it 4/5.
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I admit to being a big fan. Mostly because of the fun, but as you mentioned, there are some dark and serious motifs as well. I will say that the FootNoterPhone in later installments can stretch the limits of what's convenient to partake of in an ebook (depending on your reading device's/app's capabilities), but it's all been great fun for me. That fun started to wear a little thin for me around the fourth book, but that's pretty typical for me with any series these days.