Grimm Reality (Doctor Who)

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful combination between Who and fairy tales
Review: Grimm Reality is a Doctor Who novel that takes place on a world of fairy tales. It stars the Eighth Doctor, Fitz, and Anji, and has some wonderful scenes for all three of them. Bucher-Jones and Hale provide a science fiction explanation for the magical events on the planet, so any Who fans who don't like magic in their Who and were upset with the previous novel (City of the Dead) can be assured that this one is "safe."

The Doctor and his companions land on a planet and are very soon cut off from the TARDIS by forest that has grown instantly around the ship so they can't get back in. They start exploring the world, and all three of them stumble into three different situations that look like fairy tales. Fitz gets involved in a quest with two princes, Anji gets trapped by a witch into a contract to be a servant to six spoiled young girls. Finally, the Doctor gets involved with trying to revive a sleeping princess. Things steamroll from there, getting more and more strange as different fairy tale aspects start mixing. Things start to make a bit more sense for the reader once the Doctor figures out what's going on, but the ride up to that point is enjoyable as well.

Meanwhile, there is a starship with a crew consisting of three races, the Vuim, the Abanak, and humans, who are trying to establish mining rights for this world and the white singularity that's around it. To be honest, the plot surrounding the Vuim grinds the story to a halt every time the book goes back to it, and it has to work hard to retrieve its momentum when the story shifts back to one of the other subplots. The other aspects of the crew, though, are much more interesting, and the humans do provide impetus for the other subplots involving the Doctor and crew. In fact, its hilarious watching the rivalry between Anji and Christina, the human ship captain, after Christina gets drawn into Anji's plot.

The fairy tales that Bucher-Jones and Hale draw upon are not the nice, tidy ones that get read to children nowadays, but the ugly ones that were the original Grimm's tales. It can be a rude awakening for the reader who wasn't aware that Grimm's tales are actually quite grim and is expecting something else. The authors make great use of the inspiration though, putting the characters through their paces with elegant prose, interesting situations, and "what the f---?" revelations.

The main revelation comes about 2/3 through the novel, and it results in the only drawback to this book. Once the tales are "explained," the technobabble gets a bit thick. It's nothing a science fiction fan isn't used to, but it's sad that it degenerates to that. Given the magical nature of City of the Dead (the previous book), it would have been nice to have a little more magic and a little less science in this one. I guess that would have offended the purists, though.

This book is not one to be raced through. It's a book that should be devoured in chunks and savoured. The writing is wonderful, the plot is interesting, and the characters are marvelously portrayed. Something is done with each one of them, and this book is much more of an ensemble piece than the last couple of Eighth Doctor Adventures have been. It's good to see that the line is continuing such good stories. This one makes three in a row now.

Rating:
Summary: Grim Banality
Review: GRIMM REALITY starts off incredibly well. So well, in fact, that I'd rate the prologue of this book as one of the best that the range has produced. It's sharp, it's slightly surreal, and it does a wonderful job at conveying the mood and feeling of the rest of the book. Unfortunately, the remainder of the story fails to live up to this fantastic opening, as the plot starts off dragging and then explodes into incoherence, and the characters consistently fail to impress.

The plot starts off slowly, and for the first two hundred pages or so, it never seems to get out of first gear. It feels like a one-trick pony, where we are repeatedly shown the regulars put into different generic fairy tale stories. This generates a lot of amusement and hilarity at first, but it quickly becomes stale when the characters act like fools and simply repeat the fairy tale conventions rather than subverting them or doing anything interesting with them. Rather than becoming a part of the fairy-tale and bringing their own personalities into the old stories, it felt as though the regulars were shoehorned into the tales and weren't given the chance to act as their own person.

After that page two hundred mark, the story takes a turn for the worse. Given the excuse, suddenly random events start to occur that are given little justification and little reason. It feels as though it is being strange just for the sake of being strange and not for any other motivation. It's a shame that the ending of the book took this form, as there should have been some interesting ways to deal with the events of the beginning and middle.

Very few of the characters seem to be fully fleshed out and they all feel more like caricatures than characters. This made perfect sense as far as the fairy tale characters are concerned; after all, one doesn't expect stunning realism when dealing with wicked stepmothers and archetypal princes. But unfortunately this sloppiness extended into the entire cast, including the outsiders to the fairy-tale world and even to the regulars themselves. The exchanges (and the inner thoughts that were interspersed throughout those sequences) between Anji and the female starship commander were so clichéd and banal, that I had to wonder if there was some joke that I was missing.

With all that said, it's a shame that the book doesn't hold together so well, because there are several individual standout moments that border on excellence. The prologue is delicious, and does a great job of setting the stage for the book as well as being a superb piece of writing in its own right. This is one of the best openings to a Doctor Who book that I've read in a long time, and probably rests as one of my favourite ever openings in the series. Several of the jokes sprinkled throughout are rather quite funny, and when the book does try to amuse, it usually succeeds. Also of note is Anji's Cinderella subplot, which for the most part is quite enjoyable, although it becomes less endearing the longer it progresses. I also enjoyed many of the passages that were written in the same form as the old fairy-tales. It's a pity that the whole book couldn't have been written in this manner, as the prose really sparkled.

To sum up, I found GRIMM REALITY to be a disappointment. It had a great premise and failed to capitalize on it. By the time one gets to the end, one notices that there have been too many threads that were never tied together. The whole enterprise just feels like a letdown to what should have been a great story. The different portions just never seem to completely mesh together, and it feels rather disjointed. A few minor problems with the narrative at the beginning don't help. Sadly, not one of the more enjoyable EDAs.

Rating:
Summary: A real stitch
Review: I have always loved the stories of Brothers Grimm, and here they are combined with Doctor Who. What's not to love? Clever, witty and fun. It goes back to the good old days when Doctor Who was allowed to be exciting and enjoyable. Later novels focus so much on the current dreary arc, even I a life-long Doctor Who fan am turned off. Enough is enough. Let's have some fun already. Reading Who shouldn't feel like a dreaded English assignment. This book not only stands alone, but breaks free of angst! Hallelujah!

Rating:
Summary: Quite simply the worst Dr Who novel ever
Review: It was an omen that this book was initially released in North America without page 146. When those misprints flooded bookstores in 2001, my initial reaction was to buy anyway... having read Simon Bucher-Jones previous offerings (and knowing not thing one about Kelly Hale), I assumed I wouldn't understand page 146 even if I had it.

Well, I waited, and I finally bought _Grimm Reality_. Almost as if ashamed to be part of the same line as all the other BBC novels, this book is unique in that there's no thumbnail reprint of the cover illustration on the spine. Page 146 is here, now, although it doesn't add all that much.

I will admit defeat here. _Grimm Reality_ is the first original "Doctor Who" novel (not counting _The Paradise of Death_) which I simply and utterly could not finish. My bookmark indicates that I gave up at around page 200-201, and that was six months ago.

Why didn't I finish? The style, for one. I think it's easy to tell which author wrote which segments of the book, for one, if Bucher-Jones's past style is anything to go by. My guess is that Grimm, the jokey fairy-tale segments -- those featuring Anji and Fitz -- are by newcomer Hale. The rest -- Reality -- is by Bucher-Jones, whose previous works _The Death of Art_ and _The Taking of Planet 5_ were muddled, unenjoyable messes.

Name-calling is one thing, but there's literally nothing I enjoy about this style of prose. The book's drive is set aside for pages at a time as the author devotes hundreds of words to describing technobabbly conundrums that don't exist. Sample sentences: "Candles the size of an albino blacksmith's arms in the cups of great candelabra as distant as the moon". "A ship the size of a city ploughing across a black, burned continent, records and images from shattered memory banks falling like microscopic confetti into the receiving earth." There's just not a whole lot of *book* in all this. Reading chapters comprised of sentences like the above really does nothing for me at all.

The Grimm half the book had some amusing moments. Turning the Jackson Five into ugly fairy-tale stepsisters might be a questionable notion (and maybe only in lightly-edited TV tie-in novels could such an idea bear fruit) but those sections are faintly amusing. Some of the fractured Grimm notions, such as the house that eats the travelers who spend the night, to "feed the pot", work well -- in this particular instance because one of the regulars is allowed a nice, human character moment. A rarity in the book as a whole.

On the whole, I found no impetus to finish _Grimm Reality_. Judging by the below reviews I may have been the only one who felt this way. But my reading time is precious and this is never how I want to spend it.

Rating:
Summary: The Death of Doctor Who
Review: It was an omen that this book was initially released in North America without page 146. When those misprints flooded bookstores in 2001, my initial reaction was to buy anyway... having read Simon Bucher-Jones previous offerings (and knowing not thing one about Kelly Hale), I assumed I wouldn't understand page 146 even if I had it.

Well, I waited, and I finally bought _Grimm Reality_. Almost as if ashamed to be part of the same line as all the other BBC novels, this book is unique in that there's no thumbnail reprint of the cover illustration on the spine. Page 146 is here, now, although it doesn't add all that much.

I will admit defeat here. _Grimm Reality_ is the first original "Doctor Who" novel (not counting _The Paradise of Death_) which I simply and utterly could not finish. My bookmark indicates that I gave up at around page 200-201, and that was six months ago.

Why didn't I finish? The style, for one. I think it's easy to tell which author wrote which segments of the book, for one, if Bucher-Jones's past style is anything to go by. My guess is that Grimm, the jokey fairy-tale segments -- those featuring Anji and Fitz -- are by newcomer Hale. The rest -- Reality -- is by Bucher-Jones, whose previous works _The Death of Art_ and _The Taking of Planet 5_ were muddled, unenjoyable messes.

Name-calling is one thing, but there's literally nothing I enjoy about this style of prose. The book's drive is set aside for pages at a time as the author devotes hundreds of words to describing technobabbly conundrums that don't exist. Sample sentences: "Candles the size of an albino blacksmith's arms in the cups of great candelabra as distant as the moon". "A ship the size of a city ploughing across a black, burned continent, records and images from shattered memory banks falling like microscopic confetti into the receiving earth." There's just not a whole lot of *book* in all this. Reading chapters comprised of sentences like the above really does nothing for me at all.

The Grimm half the book had some amusing moments. Turning the Jackson Five into ugly fairy-tale stepsisters might be a questionable notion (and maybe only in lightly-edited TV tie-in novels could such an idea bear fruit) but those sections are faintly amusing. Some of the fractured Grimm notions, such as the house that eats the travelers who spend the night, to "feed the pot", work well -- in this particular instance because one of the regulars is allowed a nice, human character moment. A rarity in the book as a whole.

On the whole, I found no impetus to finish _Grimm Reality_. Judging by the below reviews I may have been the only one who felt this way. But my reading time is precious and this is never how I want to spend it.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but...
Review: On the one hand, Grimm Reality's tale of the Doctor and his companions stuck on a planet that seems to be a fairy story come to life is a lot of fun. Anji and Fitz, with their 20th/21st century attitudes bumping up against the fairy tale situations, get some of the best scenes. Anji has some particularly hilarious moments when she finds herself stuck working for an entire family of wicked stepsisters. And the Doctor is perfectly at home playing the role of Doctor Know-All, the standard fairy tale wise man. Authors Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale do a good job melding the Doctor Who style with the trappings of a Disney movie.

On the other hand, the book suffers from a lack of clarity as far as what's really going on, which ultimately hurt my enjoyment of it. It was all fun until I got to the end, and realized that I really had only the vaguest idea what had happened, and that was disappointing. On top of that, many of the supporting characters lacked any real depth, and it became difficult to care about them. At times, I felt more like I was reading a collection of good ideas incompletely explored, rather than a cohesive whole. On the other hand, Dave Stone's recent Doctor Who novel, Slow Empire, was an even worse example of that, so at least Grimm Reality didn't fall as far as it might.

So, at the end of the day, Grimm Reality is a novel that completists shouldn't feel bitter about having on their shelves. It's an entertaining story, and it perfectly captures the character of the Doctor. But fans who are looking for an outstanding story might be better off reading last month's City of the Dead and (from what I hear) next month's Adventuress of Henrietta Street, and giving this one a pass.

Rating:
Summary: Quite simply the worst Dr Who novel ever
Review: What a disaster.

I'd believe this book to be one giant inside joke if the po-faced first few chapters had not been so deadly serious. I cannot describe quite how much this book disappointed me. So I will not even attempt to. The lack of color on the cover will tell you every single thing you need to know. Never has a title been more appropriate. Grim, in every sense of the word.