Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde (Speculative Fiction — Audio Book)

I had such a good time listening to this fast paced, humorous, always surprising, adventure rich speculative fiction story by the master of Weird, Jasper Fforde. I highly recommend listening to the audio book as the reader is fantastic and really adds a depth to the events through his voicing of the characters.

In this fully fleshed out imagined world, a person’s role in society is strictly proscribed by the percentage of the color spectrum s/he can see. Two individuals — Eddie, a relatively well-endowed seer of Red, and Jane, a Grey with no color vision at all — set out to bring justice to this world of strict rules and sudden “mildew” events (mildew is always fatal and there is some strong suspicion that exposure is not the accident it is made out to be). We learn more about the mechanics, extent, and population of the world at the same time as our heroes, the onion peeling back layer by layer through a bizarre set of events that I personally could never have imagined. It’s quite fun to read (or listen to — my recommendation!). Composed of precise language and the most thoroughly imagined political and scientific composition, it’s full of British snark and wit. I tend to be bored by pure adventure books — people getting out of one scrape only to enter another — but with the added stimulation of a wildly imaginative world tossing out screwball dangers that each teach us something brand new (and startling) about the world itself, I’m all in.

Enjoyed every minute of it.

By the way, this book is a sequel to the 2011 Shades of Grey which I have not read. Fforde did a great job explaining just enough that there was no confusion, without retelling the entire (previous) story.

Thank you to Recorded Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book was published on May 7th, 2024.