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The Scarlet Empress (Doctor Who series)

The Scarlet Empress (Doctor Who series)

List Price: $5.95
Your Price: $5.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: One of the best Doctor Who books published... buy this, and Vampire Science, if you're new to the series...

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: How do you say "over-rated"?
Review: Pual Magrs' first foray into the Whoniverse is written very competently. In fact, I didn't notice any glaring grammatical errors. This is probably the nicest thing I'm going to say about this book.

I don't have a problem with magic realism; in fact, I absolutely adore _The Blue Angel_, Magrs' second book with Jeremy Hoad. However, this one just doesn't work. The reason why is simple; Magrs is so busy coming up with neat little ways to describe things that he forgot to include a coherent plot in the novel.

The plot loosely revolves around a quest. The Doctor and Sam meet up with a figure from the Doctor's past named Iris, a batty Time Lady who looks a little like the town librarian and seems to be quietly appropriating the Doctor's past adventures for herself. Along the way, they meet up with four terminally uninteresting characters and ramble around in a haphazard manner, fiddling around with various denziens of the planet Prospero and generally being useless. Things culminate in a showdown which completely removes any credibility from the quest. The characters wander off in seperate directions and the reader is left with the shell-shocked feeling that the author is screaming about his cleverness into the reader's ear with a megaphone.

Paul Magrs needs a co-writer to be effective; in _The Blue Angel_, various ideas are tossed at the reader all at once, only to be stitched into a coherent picture by the end. The overwhelming feeling left at the end of _The Scarlet Empress_ is, "Um, is that it?"

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: How do you say "over-rated"?
Review: Pual Magrs' first foray into the Whoniverse is written very competently. In fact, I didn't notice any glaring grammatical errors. This is probably the nicest thing I'm going to say about this book.

I don't have a problem with magic realism; in fact, I absolutely adore _The Blue Angel_, Magrs' second book with Jeremy Hoad. However, this one just doesn't work. The reason why is simple; Magrs is so busy coming up with neat little ways to describe things that he forgot to include a coherent plot in the novel.

The plot loosely revolves around a quest. The Doctor and Sam meet up with a figure from the Doctor's past named Iris, a batty Time Lady who looks a little like the town librarian and seems to be quietly appropriating the Doctor's past adventures for herself. Along the way, they meet up with four terminally uninteresting characters and ramble around in a haphazard manner, fiddling around with various denziens of the planet Prospero and generally being useless. Things culminate in a showdown which completely removes any credibility from the quest. The characters wander off in seperate directions and the reader is left with the shell-shocked feeling that the author is screaming about his cleverness into the reader's ear with a megaphone.

Paul Magrs needs a co-writer to be effective; in _The Blue Angel_, various ideas are tossed at the reader all at once, only to be stitched into a coherent picture by the end. The overwhelming feeling left at the end of _The Scarlet Empress_ is, "Um, is that it?"

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: One of the best 8th Doctor story's yet!
Review: The Scarlet Empress is surely one of the best stories so far to come out of the new line of "Who" series. In this, the Doctor goes on a wild excursion across the world of Hyspero along with several well-drawn and interesting companions. One in paticular, Iris, proves to be one of the most memorable characters I've come across in a while and could easliy become a reaccuring role(and she's a Timelord!!). This book is well worth the money. It's a wild roadtrip across a planet full of fantastic magic and danger.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: This book is a waist of valuable reading time.
Review: This book is a big disgrace to the Dr. Who World and waist of valuable reading time. I got so bored reading this book, on many occassions I fell asleep while reading. The reason why I continued reading until the end is that I did not want my money to go to waist. I enjoyed seeing Iris' return, however, that did not even spice the book up. This book sadly lacked a sense of direction in it, and should be recalled from all book stores where it is sold.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Odd but enjoyable
Review: This is not a book for anyone who does not *really* enjoy reading, as it is as much a story *about* story-telling as it is a story in itself. Full of digressions, fillips, curlicues, dead-ends, jumps in the narrative, illogicalities, oddities, eccentrics, and just plain weirdness, it is also not for someone expecting a straight-forward adventure tale. The Doctor is as much spectator or participant, the plot is rather thin (until the end), and the prose style dense and ornate. But if you stick with it and savor it for what it is, rather than reject it for what it isn't, you will find it engrossing, delectable, unique, and unforgettable.


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