The oddest thing in the universe of this book is not that time travel works, and can change history; it isn't even that a mad scientists' invention can send people into great books. The oddest thing is that literature is as important to the people on the street as, say, sports is to us; coin-op machines perform Shakespeare soliloquies and so many people change their names to that of their favorite poet that the Tennysons, for instance, are required to wear registration numbers. Wales is independent, which is probably an homage to the guy who both declared Hay-on-Wye an independent state and made it a used-bookstore tourist destination.
Down these twee streets a character must go who is not herself twee.
Tuesday Next is a noir detective, shouldering the gloom of
military stupidity in her tour as a soldier in the Crimean War, facing
down lost love & a complicated family loyalties (I suspect her name is a
parental joke about her conception: her father is a time-travel agent
too). She rises from a career as a minor literary detective when she
must thwart a supervillian and his threat to kill Martin
Chuzzlewit. Reckless rule-breaking leads to promotion; the whole leads
to a sequel.
So wrote clew in
SF&F.