A review by kribu
Doctor Who: The Bog Warrior by Cecelia Ahern
2.0
Honestly? This was a mess. Sigh.
I really like the idea, in theory, of having a lot of very different authors writing Doctor Who short stories these days. This is a great way to bring some new viewpoints to the genre and to Doctor Who tie-in fiction - a fresh, different perspective. I know Cecelia Ahern is a popular, well-regarded author; I haven't actually read anything else by her so far but I've bought a couple of books in the last few years which are still in my TBR list.
In short, I'd hoped for something refreshing, or, at the very least, solid.
This was neither.
In case the blurb doesn't give it away, this is Cinderella on a random planet. Or rather, the love story of Ash and Prince Zircon, hindered by Ash's cruel stepmother Queen Xenotime who had Ash's parents Queen Amethyst and King Allanite killed at some point and uses Ash for slave labour in the peat tunnels.
A Cinderella retelling can work, and work well - just look at Marissa Meyer's Cinder. This... well.
I'm putting the rest in spoiler tags because to explain my problems with the story, I really can't help but give a lot of it away.
There is no explanation for, well, almost anything. Why are humans on this random planet with three moons? (They're humans, the Doctor is sure of that.) Why are they re-enacting Cinderella? (Why is the Doctor not pointing out that this is Cinderella, by the way? Ten's internal monologue would certainly allow for that kind of comment.)
Why is everyone named after minerals and roots and mosses? The Doctor makes a big deal of this being important, but it's actually never explained. The concept of bog people - long-dead remains of ancient people brought back to a semi-life somehow - is explained by the locals as Queen Xenotime's witchcraft, which the Doctor immediately dismisses and says something about "must be the minerals here and the magnetic field" (that kept the bodies from decaying completely and brought them back to life?? yeah, I can believe the preservation, but, um, bringing a whole legion of long-dead people back to life is something I'd like an explanation for beyond "oh, there must be something about the planet", especially if this is supposed to be a better explanation than "witchcraft").
I read an ARC of this story, so it's possible the final, published version is more polished (although from what I can tell from the sample on Amazon, it's identical), but the writing was just... poor, throughout. Surprisingly so for an established, acclaimed author. I kept wondering if this story had seen an editor at all or if anyone had even beta-read it.
It had the feeling of a draft written in a hurry, to be honest. The pacing and lack of explanations I already mentioned, but also just things like the Doctor having a presumably normal-voiced conversation with someone, while not wanting to be seen or heard, and yet apparently being close enough to the people he's hiding from that he only needs to "lean closer" and he can hear everything people mutter under their breaths. Or, for that matter, how Xenotime even knew what the shoes looked like, considering she'd never seen them and could only have had some soldiers' description of them.
And then there are things like this, which made me wonder:
... so was it rotten or like leather, polished, preserved?
The timeline in the second part of the story was completely messed up, IMHO. It's stated at one point that they had "less than an hour" until an event they needed to prevent. They spent some time looking for the right shoe, trying on thirty different ones that looked about right...
...and then the very next scene has this:
Essentially, this means that the previous scene ended with the Doctor and Ash finding the shoe they needed, and then enough time has passed that the Queen discovered someone had been in the shoe closet, had her guards to capture the maid Coalette, and also our heroes already know about this. They now should have perhaps half an hour, at most, until their deadline, and yet the scene has them travel through tunnels "out of town and to the countryside, through the village" to find someone they needed to talk to. Then they have a talk with the man, and ... somehow still make it back to town centre with ten minutes to spare.
Unless the town and village are extremely tiny, requiring five minutes to get from one end to the other, on foot, this just isn't adding up. And that bothered me.
There was also at times just far too much telling in the writing. Early on, the Doctor has literally just appeared and offers to take Ash to safety, which is followed by this: "Prince Zircon took in the Doctor, immediately found cause to trust him but gave him a look of warning." Immediately found cause to trust him? As simple as that? Why? Why even have that bit there anyway? Later on, a dramatic death of a supporting character is just told in a line or two, with his "inconsolable" friend (whom no one had even tried to console yet) rushing to his "deathbed" (the character in question was just stabbed in the middle of town centre, so even with the "deathbed" being a metaphorical one, that struck me as an odd choice of word).
... and then everything is wrapped up in five minutes or so.
Yes, the pacing - the rushedness, the lack of explanations, the extremely superficial characters, the way everything is wrapped up in the last five minutes - it's all the way it's done in the TV episodes, especially New!Who era. I suppose in that sense, it fits Ten (whose characterisation, while not off, was barely there), but on the other hand, what makes for good, fast-paced TV, does not necessarily work in a written story.
Sigh. With all this ranting, one might ask why two stars, not one. I'm basically giving it an extra star for the bog people. I liked them, sort of. Even if there never was any explanation to how they actually came about.
* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thanks!
I really like the idea, in theory, of having a lot of very different authors writing Doctor Who short stories these days. This is a great way to bring some new viewpoints to the genre and to Doctor Who tie-in fiction - a fresh, different perspective. I know Cecelia Ahern is a popular, well-regarded author; I haven't actually read anything else by her so far but I've bought a couple of books in the last few years which are still in my TBR list.
In short, I'd hoped for something refreshing, or, at the very least, solid.
This was neither.
In case the blurb doesn't give it away, this is Cinderella on a random planet. Or rather, the love story of Ash and Prince Zircon, hindered by Ash's cruel stepmother Queen Xenotime who had Ash's parents Queen Amethyst and King Allanite killed at some point and uses Ash for slave labour in the peat tunnels.
A Cinderella retelling can work, and work well - just look at Marissa Meyer's Cinder. This... well.
I'm putting the rest in spoiler tags because to explain my problems with the story, I really can't help but give a lot of it away.
Spoiler
The story was rushed, the pacing felt really off from beginning to end (the entire story basically takes place within a couple of hours, during which there's a masquerade, a battle, kidnapping, looking for shoes, people telling their history to The Doctor, long travels through tunnels and visiting people living some distance away, having the Prince nearly executed, having an entire population of the bog people wiped out, and having the new royals take up their position in charge and hold speeches, whew).There is no explanation for, well, almost anything. Why are humans on this random planet with three moons? (They're humans, the Doctor is sure of that.) Why are they re-enacting Cinderella? (Why is the Doctor not pointing out that this is Cinderella, by the way? Ten's internal monologue would certainly allow for that kind of comment.)
Why is everyone named after minerals and roots and mosses? The Doctor makes a big deal of this being important, but it's actually never explained. The concept of bog people - long-dead remains of ancient people brought back to a semi-life somehow - is explained by the locals as Queen Xenotime's witchcraft, which the Doctor immediately dismisses and says something about "must be the minerals here and the magnetic field" (that kept the bodies from decaying completely and brought them back to life?? yeah, I can believe the preservation, but, um, bringing a whole legion of long-dead people back to life is something I'd like an explanation for beyond "oh, there must be something about the planet", especially if this is supposed to be a better explanation than "witchcraft").
I read an ARC of this story, so it's possible the final, published version is more polished (although from what I can tell from the sample on Amazon, it's identical), but the writing was just... poor, throughout. Surprisingly so for an established, acclaimed author. I kept wondering if this story had seen an editor at all or if anyone had even beta-read it.
It had the feeling of a draft written in a hurry, to be honest. The pacing and lack of explanations I already mentioned, but also just things like the Doctor having a presumably normal-voiced conversation with someone, while not wanting to be seen or heard, and yet apparently being close enough to the people he's hiding from that he only needs to "lean closer" and he can hear everything people mutter under their breaths. Or, for that matter, how Xenotime even knew what the shoes looked like, considering she'd never seen them and could only have had some soldiers' description of them.
And then there are things like this, which made me wonder:
"rotten flesh hanging from them, flapping in the breeze as they ran, though it didn’t look like flesh – it was like leather, unusually polished, shiny, preserved"
... so was it rotten or like leather, polished, preserved?
The timeline in the second part of the story was completely messed up, IMHO. It's stated at one point that they had "less than an hour" until an event they needed to prevent. They spent some time looking for the right shoe, trying on thirty different ones that looked about right...
...and then the very next scene has this:
Since Xenotime’s discovery of her raided shoe closet, they were now searching for Princess Ash and the Doctor, while poor Coalette had been captured.
Essentially, this means that the previous scene ended with the Doctor and Ash finding the shoe they needed, and then enough time has passed that the Queen discovered someone had been in the shoe closet, had her guards to capture the maid Coalette, and also our heroes already know about this. They now should have perhaps half an hour, at most, until their deadline, and yet the scene has them travel through tunnels "out of town and to the countryside, through the village" to find someone they needed to talk to. Then they have a talk with the man, and ... somehow still make it back to town centre with ten minutes to spare.
Unless the town and village are extremely tiny, requiring five minutes to get from one end to the other, on foot, this just isn't adding up. And that bothered me.
There was also at times just far too much telling in the writing. Early on, the Doctor has literally just appeared and offers to take Ash to safety, which is followed by this: "Prince Zircon took in the Doctor, immediately found cause to trust him but gave him a look of warning." Immediately found cause to trust him? As simple as that? Why? Why even have that bit there anyway? Later on, a dramatic death of a supporting character is just told in a line or two, with his "inconsolable" friend (whom no one had even tried to console yet) rushing to his "deathbed" (the character in question was just stabbed in the middle of town centre, so even with the "deathbed" being a metaphorical one, that struck me as an odd choice of word).
... and then everything is wrapped up in five minutes or so.
Yes, the pacing - the rushedness, the lack of explanations, the extremely superficial characters, the way everything is wrapped up in the last five minutes - it's all the way it's done in the TV episodes, especially New!Who era. I suppose in that sense, it fits Ten (whose characterisation, while not off, was barely there), but on the other hand, what makes for good, fast-paced TV, does not necessarily work in a written story.
Sigh. With all this ranting, one might ask why two stars, not one. I'm basically giving it an extra star for the bog people. I liked them, sort of. Even if there never was any explanation to how they actually came about.
* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thanks!