Well I finished it, and it only took 3 months of what felt like homework for the first 200 pages. I think we should start with the version of this review I wrote 100 pages in out of a need to vent my frustrations...

I wish I had liked this book, I could have liked this book, but little by little, small moments and inconsequential lines wore me down so I am now forced to conclude this is not particularly good.

I'll start with the biggest gripe, the characterisation of Polly, who the author chooses to write as 1.girl, 2.hot, 3.frightened, and little else. To give an example, early in the story Polly gets teleported to the middle of a cave system in total darkness and her first instinct to navigate her way out (after she has stopped being terrified) is to use a lipstick she is not currently in possession of to mark the cave walls she cannot see, and while she does come up with a viable plan soon after the moment still annoyed me, it was wholly unnecessary and made her seem stupid. Most instances that bothered me were not as notable but they were very frequent to a very frustrating degree. Even if the 60s characterised her similarly, which is a big if, this was written in the 2000s and could have shown the character a little more respect.

It's not just Polly though, it's all the women in this story. It took 70 pages to find out Shadow had shrapnel embedded in his face, he was the perspective character for the first chapter, and this is notable because at this point in the book I knew exactly which of the women in the story were hot and which were ugly and why. Every time Ben saw someone for the first time there's a comment in the narration of if he finds them attractive, and every time Polly came across one of the men there's a comment in the narration about how they find her attractive. It is so frustrating because it is so unnecessary and entirely one sided, nobody is ogling Ben, and other than Shade I don’t know if Polly found any of the men attractive

Like, I want to enjoy this book, the mystery is intriguing, I like the idea of it playing with its format in later chapters. There are moments that there's a reprieve from the constant frustrating moments and I would get into the story for a short while but then I'd get snapped out of it by some annoying line. Why have Ben make a random racist comment seemingly just so Polly can tell him he shouldn’t have said that? Why x? Why y? Why z? Please I just want to enjoy the book. I like the story underneath all of this. Please let me enjoy the book! Aaaagghhhhhh.

I wrote all that while reading the first 100 or so pages of the book, before the real meat of the plot got going. It is all very true to the frustrations I had in the those opening chapters, after that the annoying elements of the narration slow down, although do not entirely go away, to the point I can actually ignore them (perhaps because all the characters have finally been introduced to one another so the running commentary on the attractiveness of the women stopped).

Unfortunately while I stopped being actively frustrated by it, the book did not get that much better. The plot started to feel more repetitive and less interesting, but I would say my biggest problem was the characterisation.

Frankly, there are too many of them, it took until near the very end for me to even be able to name them all. There are a handful who were interesting and characters I could distinguish from the others, but that still left four or five (I honestly can’t remember) who I simply did not care about because it was impossible to get to know them and what made them distinct characters. This would potentially have been fine, background army grunts are a dime a dozen in Doctor Who as a whole, but if they're all in one group and half the them can't be trusted it’s a lot more important to be able to tell who’s who, and I couldn’t.

Of the core TARDIS team, Ben is really the only character to receive any amount of love. The Doctor is an active part of the story but most of the time what he’s doing feels at best tangential from the current focus of the plot, this is mostly fine, the Doctor not explaining themselves if par for the course, and there are certainly some action heavy sections the first Doctor can’t really participate in, so I don’t hugely begrudge the book this, Polly however… well let’s just say it doesn’t much improve on those first hundred pages. It feels at times that the author wanted to write a first Doctor and Ben story and Polly is only there out of necessity.

Let’s see, I’ve talked about the writing and characters, I suppose I should talk about the plot, the thin thin plot. Look, it's not bad, just repetitive. There are many times where the group splits up to look for something or someone, later regroup for a chapter just to split up again. It all works in the moment but by the time you finish it all just feels kind of like padding.

There is also the overarching mystery of what exactly is going on. I don't have a lot to say on that front, it's serviceable for the most part, although the resolution in the final few chapters was at times very hard to follow, characters I thought were dead in fact weren’t for no discernible reason, I won’t say anything else in an attempt to keep this spoiler free, but yeah it wasn’t great

I would take my opinions on the plot with a pinch of salt, I very much read this book in fits and starts, it took me around 3 months, and I would sometimes take breaks from it for a few weeks. It could very well be that the novel flows really well if read at a more normal pace. My thoughts on the characterisation and writing however should be taken entirely at face value though as the reason I struggled so much.

Now you may ask, why did I bother, if I disliked the book this much why didn't I simply stop reading. Well it was at least partly that I have never read a Doctor Who novel before so wanted to finish the first one I tried, but mainly I was really curious about the choose your own adventure style section I knew was towards the end, curious enough to keep me slogging through the first 200 pages.

I did really enjoy the choose your own adventure section, it flowed really well and was pretty tense throughout, I particularly enjoyed being able to get different characters perspectives on the same events. It also, mercifully, was written very differently, no annoying comments, or rather if there were I didn't notice because it's in first person and thus not outside narration, just the characters thoughts. I found myself trying to make sure I read as much of it as possible

Was it worth it? No, I waded through a whole load of rubbish to read one genuinely good section. But hey I did it, and now I can confidently say nobody else should ever read this book again. Sorry Stephen Cole I'm sure this isn't a reflection of any of your other writing, and I do mean that genuinely, I know he’s written a lot for the extended universe, so it's sort of necessary to believe it.