Toy Soldiers (Doctor Who the New Adventures)

Rating:
Summary: Toy Soldiers
Review: A brutal war-zone of a Doctor Who novel (can't you tell from the cover?), where kids are being kidnapped from early 20th Century Earth to fight a mysterious, never-ending war. They're not the only ones--the Ogrons figure in, as do a bear-like race called the Biune, and more innocents, culled from planets just to die on the front-lines in the muck, thanks to some hidden overseer who, it turns out, is running war for one of the strangest reasons you could imagine.

The Doctor has very few scenes in this book, meaning that companions, Roz, Chris, and Bennie dominate the proceedings. Bennie faces forced indoctrination into the war, Roz and Chris face distrust and racism (well, Roz faces rascism--and since she's from, as I recall, the 30th century, she doesn't even cop to all the racism of Earth circa 1919 at first...but she finally figures it out) while tracking missing children. Things come to a head as all the time-travellers, from various angles, realize the forced indoctrination is being stepped up.

The author does not hide from his premise; this book features the brutal death of at least one young girl. But if you can stomach such depictions (not over-the-top, but definitely nasty), this is a better, more intricate Who book than the last Paul Leonard entry I read, Revolution Man (I still can't give this one more than a three-star review, though). The explanation for this particular war is the supreme comment on the waste of war; let's hope, in the real world, warmakers are never quite THIS nutty.

Harsh and gritty, but tightly plotted and enjoyable. I wish the Doctor could have saved all the children, but he tried.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The idea that an alien civilization would kidnap kids to fight their wars is an intriguing one; sort of "Peter Pan" meets "All Quiet on the Western Front." Unfortunately, this is yet another New Adventure that spends too much time on character and not enough on plot. In addition, the Doctor is absent for most of the book, and we're left with Roz dealing with racism in 1920's France (which I thought was a tad unrealistic; France was much more liberal about race than most countries at that time).

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The idea that an alien civilization would kidnap kids to fight their wars is an intriguing one; sort of "Peter Pan" meets "All Quiet on the Western Front." Unfortunately, this is yet another New Adventure that spends too much time on character and not enough on plot. In addition, the Doctor is absent for most of the book, and we're left with Roz dealing with racism in 1920's France (which I thought was a tad unrealistic; France was much more liberal about race than most countries at that time).

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The idea that an alien civilization would kidnap kids to fight their wars is an intriguing one; sort of "Peter Pan" meets "All Quiet on the Western Front." Unfortunately, this is yet another New Adventure that spends too much time on character and not enough on plot. In addition, the Doctor is absent for most of the book, and we're left with Roz dealing with racism in 1920's France (which I thought was a tad unrealistic; France was much more liberal about race than most countries at that time).

Rating:
Summary: The March of the Wooden Soliders
Review: TOY SOLDIERS, to be brief, is a collection of some absolutely brilliant set pieces tied together in a plot that is merely adequate. Paul Leonard definitely knows how to write a good sentence. He has a great ability to construct an emotional and heart-tugging scene. He even creates some extremely worthy characters. But the talent to put all those excellent pieces together in a coherent story is something that has at times escaped him during the course of his writing career. Fortunately, in this instance, it isn't enough to derail the project. The finished product is a little bit less than the sum of its parts, but I'm not going to complain too much when the author uses such quality parts.

In post-WWI Europe, most of the young men are dead. But something is happening to those that are left; children are being kidnapped, and the only clue is that each child was given a teddy bear by a mysterious stranger shortly before vanishing. The Doctor, Benny, Chris and Roz are, of course, investigating the disappearances. Chris and Roz stay in Europe looking for the responsible parties. The Doctor and Benny soon find themselves trapped on a planet called Q'ell, where the children are being forced to fight and die alongside aliens in a war that seems to serve no purpose.

The regular characters are extremely well portrayed here. They all have their place and their function, but there is room enough for the characters to move around. Roz and Chris pair off each other entertainingly within the larger group, while the Seventh Doctor and Benny remain practically writer-proof. Leonard is the first author since Andy Lane in ORIGINAL SIN to make effective use of the two Adjudicators, and it's great to see them back on form.

I particularly liked how, in the beginning, we see the TARDIS crew exclusively from the standpoint of the secondary characters that they encounter. We are allowed to view them as strange, different people who radiate an aura of power. This is the sort of thing that Andrew Cartmel liked to do in his novels, but he usually made the Doctor seem like a force of nature, something to be in awe of. Here, there is a sense of that, but they feel more like guardian angels, albeit ones dressed in unfamiliar clothes and speaking of strange anachronistic things.

The discussions on war, killing, death and hate are, for the most part, quite interesting. Unfortunately, there are one or two places where Leonard crosses the line between subtle hinting, and sledgehammer moralizing. I really appreciated the sequence where Roz unknowingly mimicked a 20th century xenophobic woman. I didn't like it so much when the author pointed out how clever the comparison was. Still, the understated portions outweigh the heavy-handedness, so the batting average on this count is fairly good even if there are a few obvious missteps.

During the beginning of this book, the imagery and situations that Leonard was throwing at me gave me goose bumps while reading. Towards the end, some of the luster had faded, and while the ending was weak comparatively, it still made for a satisfactory conclusion. Overall, the book does overcome its flaws, and I wish that I hadn't waited so long to read this one.

(I do not seem to have good luck with the physical copies of this book I have owned. When I first bought the book back in the mid-90s, it wasn't until I got home from the bookstore that I realized I had purchased a incorrectly bound copy; opening the front cover revealed not the publishing information or blank filler, but page number 201. Pages 201 through to the end replaced the first forty pages of the book, and those first forty pages were not to be found anywhere within the covers. I promptly made a mental note to take the novel back to the shop and obtain a free replacement. Flash-forward to the year 2002, and I discovered that I had never got around to doing that. I bought myself a copy on-line that fortunately had all the pages, but on this one the margins were messed up, sometimes being too close to the outside, and, worse, sometimes being too close to the center to read the text properly. Oh well, on some days you just can't win.)

Rating:
Summary: The March of the Wooden Soliders
Review: TOY SOLDIERS, to be brief, is a collection of some absolutely brilliant set pieces tied together in a plot that is merely adequate. Paul Leonard definitely knows how to write a good sentence. He has a great ability to construct an emotional and heart-tugging scene. He even creates some extremely worthy characters. But the talent to put all those excellent pieces together in a coherent story is something that has at times escaped him during the course of his writing career. Fortunately, in this instance, it isn't enough to derail the project. The finished product is a little bit less than the sum of its parts, but I'm not going to complain too much when the author uses such quality parts.

In post-WWI Europe, most of the young men are dead. But something is happening to those that are left; children are being kidnapped, and the only clue is that each child was given a teddy bear by a mysterious stranger shortly before vanishing. The Doctor, Benny, Chris and Roz are, of course, investigating the disappearances. Chris and Roz stay in Europe looking for the responsible parties. The Doctor and Benny soon find themselves trapped on a planet called Q'ell, where the children are being forced to fight and die alongside aliens in a war that seems to serve no purpose.

The regular characters are extremely well portrayed here. They all have their place and their function, but there is room enough for the characters to move around. Roz and Chris pair off each other entertainingly within the larger group, while the Seventh Doctor and Benny remain practically writer-proof. Leonard is the first author since Andy Lane in ORIGINAL SIN to make effective use of the two Adjudicators, and it's great to see them back on form.

I particularly liked how, in the beginning, we see the TARDIS crew exclusively from the standpoint of the secondary characters that they encounter. We are allowed to view them as strange, different people who radiate an aura of power. This is the sort of thing that Andrew Cartmel liked to do in his novels, but he usually made the Doctor seem like a force of nature, something to be in awe of. Here, there is a sense of that, but they feel more like guardian angels, albeit ones dressed in unfamiliar clothes and speaking of strange anachronistic things.

The discussions on war, killing, death and hate are, for the most part, quite interesting. Unfortunately, there are one or two places where Leonard crosses the line between subtle hinting, and sledgehammer moralizing. I really appreciated the sequence where Roz unknowingly mimicked a 20th century xenophobic woman. I didn't like it so much when the author pointed out how clever the comparison was. Still, the understated portions outweigh the heavy-handedness, so the batting average on this count is fairly good even if there are a few obvious missteps.

During the beginning of this book, the imagery and situations that Leonard was throwing at me gave me goose bumps while reading. Towards the end, some of the luster had faded, and while the ending was weak comparatively, it still made for a satisfactory conclusion. Overall, the book does overcome its flaws, and I wish that I hadn't waited so long to read this one.

(I do not seem to have good luck with the physical copies of this book I have owned. When I first bought the book back in the mid-90s, it wasn't until I got home from the bookstore that I realized I had purchased a incorrectly bound copy; opening the front cover revealed not the publishing information or blank filler, but page number 201. Pages 201 through to the end replaced the first forty pages of the book, and those first forty pages were not to be found anywhere within the covers. I promptly made a mental note to take the novel back to the shop and obtain a free replacement. Flash-forward to the year 2002, and I discovered that I had never got around to doing that. I bought myself a copy on-line that fortunately had all the pages, but on this one the margins were messed up, sometimes being too close to the outside, and, worse, sometimes being too close to the center to read the text properly. Oh well, on some days you just can't win.)