Sick Building by Paul Magrs, has been very well received, at least in my neck of the woods, but I can't for the life of me see why. This book has much in common with his short story in the Doctor Who Storybook 2007 in that there is nothing actually wrong with it in any way, but compared to talking poodles, men transforming into lizards just ( Read more... )

Just as I'd pretty much decided to cut my losses and give up the new series books along comes Wetworld by Mark Michalowski challenging me to revise my assumptions. It's about as old school (as in Virgin-Books-a-like) as its possible to be within the confines of the new series, throwing around mentions of adjudicators and world-building the details ( Read more... )

Another day, another new who book, another viewpoint kidult. Once again this one was mostly just a bit bland. It is set in a small sleepy American town the better, I suppose, to capitalise on its Halloween setting, but it really felt just like a sleepy English village with the numbers filed off. This is clearly written as a child friendly horror ( Read more... )

This particular new series Dr Who adventure had a reasonably good reputation so I was looking forward to it and you know, there's nothing actually wrong with it but I was kind of bored until about page 174 when things suddenly got more interesting thanks to something that is, in fact, so completely obvious it shouldn't count as a twist. I have a ( Read more... )

I really want to like Jacqueline Rayner's work. Not simply because she is one of the few women writing Dr Who novels but because she has a distinctive voice and a bittersweet lightness of touch that should make a refreshing change from the more serious-minded and action-oriented output that typifies the range. But somehow her work never really ( Read more... )

Its sort of customary to start reviews of the Dr Who storybooks by mentioning the totally bonkers Dr Who annuals of the 1970s but I figure most people reading here either know all about them or aren't terribly interested. Suffice it to say the storybooks are their successors both in content and, in some cases, bonkersness although the storybooks ( Read more... )

This was more like it. Like all the recent Dr Who books Wooden Heart made a very quick read and like many it suffered from a belief that "Kiduldt"s need books with Kidult viewpoint characters but apart from those quibbles this one was well-written and thought-provoking. Genuniely Kiduldt in fact, demonstrating that you can handle complex issues ( Read more... )

The Quick Reads books are designed to appeal to adults who, for one reason or another, are anxious about reading. As such they are intended to be short with a limited vocabulary. I can't quite decide whether Terrance Dicks was an inspired choice to author one of these or a result of a misguided identification of "short with a simple vocabulary" ( Read more... )

The Jadepagoda mailing list had a long and agonised debate a few years back, before new Who came along and changed everything. The debate went something along the lines of "Who fans will buy any old tat with the logo on, therefore BBC books publish any old tat. If we, as Who fans, only bought the books by the authors we actually like then ( Read more... )

The About Time series are reference works providing a story-by-story guide to Dr Who. Where these differ from the half dozen or so other story-by-story guides I have on my bookshelves, is that they seek explicitly to analyse the Dr Who stories in the wider context of the culture, specifically the media culture, of the time. They started out with ( Read more... )