I loved the footnotes & the last 100 pages. Beautifully wrotten throughout, if a tad "too many words".

I loved "Jonathan Strange...". I think it turned the whole genre on its ear, which has been much needed. The idea that people flock to buy a book (and heap awards on it!) with a literary style 150 years old and numerous footnotes delights me and restores my faith in both fantasy and mainstream readers, who have also received it well. I have heard people say they had a hard time with the lack of action, but the book is actually crammed with action if you don't require 'action' to occur on the level of fistfights. In writer's terms, action is what propels a story forward, and this story goes forward at a pretty good clip, considering the length.

The footnotes are of course a necessary part of the book, as it's written as a fictional 'history' rather than a straight novel. The wordiness comes directly from the style, as in the days before radio and tv, which have conciseness forced on them by constraints of format, wordiness was not considered a literary flaw, per se. Nineteenth century novels are all a bit wordy, and if you're not a fan of such it can take some getting used to, but after "Jonathan Strange...", Jane Austen should be a snap!