I didn't have high hopes for this book. I don't generally enjoy Dalek stories (I find most of them are very same-y and dull), and the general fandom consensus didn't give me any confidence that I would enjoy this (even if I sometimes have very different opinions to the fandom at large, as most people do). Unfortunately, this somehow went worse than I expected it to.

The story had a pretty strong start with the prologue showing a well-described battle between the Daleks and the Thals, showcasing the horrors of war. Unfortunately, the rest of the book dropped the ball when it came to grappling with that theme. Sure, Sam is a pacifist and the Thals are too war hungry and Chayn never got to know her dad, but none of that really matters, and none of it carries any emotional impact like the prologue does.

When we join the Doctor and Sam and the crew of the Quetzal things are slow, as one might expect the beginning of a story to be. The problem is, the pace never picks up. It feels very much as though the author didn't have enough plot to fill a book and instead decided to pad it out.

At the end, I don't feel like I really got to know any of the characters. They're all very one-note, and about half of them die in the first part of the book. Sam basically had nothing to do again, but this time it's made worse by her constantly commenting on it and making me overly aware of it. It doesn't help that her personality is basically reduced to "jealous of anyone who gets close to the Doctor, and also kind of a pacifist". We've spent five novels with her already, you'd think at this point she'd have a personality.

The plot itself is pretty thin. The whole thing would have probably gone exactly the same if the Doctor wasn't there. The whole thing with Skaro being destroyed or not is never properly explained - probably to leave room for fans to speculate, but it's just done poorly. Space battles and exploding Daleks are the least interesting thing Doctor Who can do, and even if those action moments weren't badly written and confusing, even if I was watching them on my screen, I wouldn't have enjoyed them one bit.

The ending with the Dalek factory on the Thal ship was extremely anticlimactic, even when Sam suddenly realised it might be booby-trapped. Then there were three or four more ending, each slightly more exciting than the last, but at that point I was just so tired of this book I didn't care. And we all know Davros will be back in five books.

The most fun thing about this book is that now it's over and I can read Alien Bodies.