A review by alexampersand
Child of the Hunt by Christopher Golden, Nancy Holder
4.0
The joy of Buffy, the show, is that it nails both character and plot. The novels so far have been a little patchy on character, and had fairly mediocre plots.
This one, however, gets 5 stars for character. They really nailed them by this point (probably helped by the fact that this came out just before Season 3, so the TV writers had developed the characters enough that the novel writers could get into their shoes comfortably). The dialogue and situations all felt believable, and I genuinely would have believed if this had been a novelisation of an episode... for the most part. A couple of bits seemed stilted, mostly Giles (not sure the Americans had quite worked out how to write British dialogue just right). I particularly enjoyed the scene in the Summers house between Joyce and Cordelia - a pairing that I'm not sure we ever got in the series, but this book made me realise it might have been a nice touch.
Plot-wise, however... I would probably give this a 3. And the thing is, it's not bad, per se, there's just... a lot. There's a Renaissance Faire going on, and there seems to be something weird happening. Oh, and there are "wee folk", little goblin-leprechaun creatures. And also... a hunt, with a Norse God at the helm. I feel like either the Hunt or the Faire would have made decent plots in their own rights, but trying to combine them just left me feeling a little too overwhelmed. Honestly, I'm still not entirely sure where exactly the faerie fit in to the plan of the Hunt. (were they part of the Hunt? Or just a miscellaneous extra? Unclear!!)
There's also a random centaur thrown in, which was DEFINITELY a bit too over-loaded.
This was the longest book in the Buffy novel series so far, and I feel like the characterisation really benefitted from that, but the plot may have benefitted from being whittled down to a singular story and stuck into a 180 page novel like the others.
This one, however, gets 5 stars for character. They really nailed them by this point (probably helped by the fact that this came out just before Season 3, so the TV writers had developed the characters enough that the novel writers could get into their shoes comfortably). The dialogue and situations all felt believable, and I genuinely would have believed if this had been a novelisation of an episode... for the most part. A couple of bits seemed stilted, mostly Giles (not sure the Americans had quite worked out how to write British dialogue just right). I particularly enjoyed the scene in the Summers house between Joyce and Cordelia - a pairing that I'm not sure we ever got in the series, but this book made me realise it might have been a nice touch.
Plot-wise, however... I would probably give this a 3. And the thing is, it's not bad, per se, there's just... a lot. There's a Renaissance Faire going on, and there seems to be something weird happening. Oh, and there are "wee folk", little goblin-leprechaun creatures. And also... a hunt, with a Norse God at the helm. I feel like either the Hunt or the Faire would have made decent plots in their own rights, but trying to combine them just left me feeling a little too overwhelmed. Honestly, I'm still not entirely sure where exactly the faerie fit in to the plan of the Hunt. (were they part of the Hunt? Or just a miscellaneous extra? Unclear!!)
There's also a random centaur thrown in, which was DEFINITELY a bit too over-loaded.
This was the longest book in the Buffy novel series so far, and I feel like the characterisation really benefitted from that, but the plot may have benefitted from being whittled down to a singular story and stuck into a 180 page novel like the others.