Shades of Grey - BookWyrm

English language

Published 2011 by Penguin.

ISBN:: 978-0-14-311858-9
OCLC Number:: 227179688

An astonishing, hotly anticipated new novel from the great literary fantasist and creator of Thursday Next, Jasper Fforde. As long as anyone can remember, society has been ruled by a Colortocracy. From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green to the healing hues viewed to cure illness to a social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.Young Eddie Russett has no ambition to be anything other than a loyal drone of the Collective. With his better-than-average red perception, he could well marry Constance Oxblood and inherit the string works; he may even have enough red perception to make prefect.For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good.But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes …

An astonishing, hotly anticipated new novel from the great literary fantasist and creator of Thursday Next, Jasper Fforde. As long as anyone can remember, society has been ruled by a Colortocracy. From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green to the healing hues viewed to cure illness to a social hierarchy based upon one's limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.Young Eddie Russett has no ambition to be anything other than a loyal drone of the Collective. With his better-than-average red perception, he could well marry Constance Oxblood and inherit the string works; he may even have enough red perception to make prefect.For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good.But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes to the painful truth behind his seemingly perfect, rigidly controlled society.Curiosity—a dangerous trait to display in a society that demands total conformity—gets the better of Eddie, who beings to wonder:Why are there not enough spoons to go around?Why is everything—and everyone—barcoded?What happened to all the people who never returned from High Saffron?And why, when you begin to question the world around you, do black-and- white certainties reduce themselves to shades of grey?Part satire, part romance, part revolutionary thriller, this is the new world from the creative and comic genius of Jasper Fforde.

8 editions

Rain's Reading Log reviewed Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde (Shades of Grey, #1)

A book that thrusts you into a odd world that forces you to pay attention, and I absolutely love it for it.

5 stars

This book took me over two weeks to finish not because it was boring but because it was a challenge to read. Not in the sense that it used complex words but in the fact that I really had to focus on each paragraph because they would just sneak in key world building in a sentence and never mention it again while building upon it later. I absolutely loved how this book used the concept of color in terms of social hierarchy, human desire, societal norms, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

The characters in upon themselves are all pretty enjoyable and unique even if two dimensional at times. The protagonist, Eddie, is pretty well devloped and seems like a real person, as you are not really sure how he is going to side on the conflicts that present itself during the story.

The pacing …

This book took me over two weeks to finish not because it was boring but because it was a challenge to read. Not in the sense that it used complex words but in the fact that I really had to focus on each paragraph because they would just sneak in key world building in a sentence and never mention it again while building upon it later. I absolutely loved how this book used the concept of color in terms of social hierarchy, human desire, societal norms, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

The characters in upon themselves are all pretty enjoyable and unique even if two dimensional at times. The protagonist, Eddie, is pretty well devloped and seems like a real person, as you are not really sure how he is going to side on the conflicts that present itself during the story.

The pacing is pretty good as the whole book takes place over the course of 5 or so days even if it feels like longer. Though the tail end of the book kind of drags on going a little to deep into describing the same setting again. Though that is only a minor annoyance and does not hurt the story overall.

It is hard for me to talk about specifics of anything because this story is best to be experience blind as giving too many key details over the world (outside of the books summary) kind of ruins how things get presented.

Overall I highly recommend it to anyone who like science fiction and stories about interesting societies. Very excited to start the second book that came out last year