Beauty Sleep; Cameron Dokey – Beautiful Chaos; Gary Russel (yadwn)

[grassangel]

Beauty Sleep; Cameron Dokey

Okay, so it’s yet another retelling of a classic fairy tale. Except the princess isn’t too plucky and things are mixed up a bit but not so radically it’s something completely different. Which are all good things, as I think retellings of fairy tales should be recognisable and not something twisty and weird.
Which is why I liked this one rather than the one about Rapunzel, even if they were both written by the same author. Because, despite the fact I loathe the name ‘Aurora’ and its variants, very little has been done to change the structure of the story. (Except for neat handling of the sleeping part and the fact there’s a random cousin.)

The random cousin bit is… random, at least until you get halfway through and then realise just what’s happened. Because yeah, she falls in love with the random cousin.
It’s more squishy gooey incest than squicky though, mostly because they totally weren’t expecting it either, It’s also kind of cute that the cousin in question, at the end, is kind of in denial about the whole thing. (Even though I’m not fond at all of how he’s managed to survive a hundred years AND gets magicked back to being young, but hey, I’m not complaining all that loudly about it.)

The way the ‘sleeping for a hundred years’ was handled rather neatly though. Even though, as soon as it was brought up, you knew the magical forest was going to be involved.  Not quite the way that is was, but that and it’s part in the epilogue was rather nice.
So yes, utterly junk food reading, but really tasty junk food reading.

Beautiful Chaos; Gary Russel – Doctor Who novelisation

It’s a rare day when I decide to pick up a Doctor Who novelisation. This is partly due to the fact that my first experience with reading one was rather lacklustre and illustrated the point that you can’t really have monster of the week series as books as the one-off side characters end up being poorly characterised as there is no skilled actor to bring character to them, regardless of how lame their lines might be.
The reason I got this one was because a) it was a Donna one and b) it was set on Earth, so that meant Wilf and Sylvia made appearances. I am such a sucker for them.

It almost threatened to tear me up though as soon as I started reading. The prologue and epilogue are set post-Journey’s End and it’s so painfully obvious that Wilf and Sylvia miss the Doctor’s Donna. (Not that Sylvia would admit that, but the way she reacted to the letter that Donna arranged to be delivered to her mum if she hadn’t been seen for six weeks… yeah.)
The actual story is set a couple of weeks after ‘Fire in the Sky’ or whatever that Sontaran episode was called. So yes, wet eye worthy.
Although it kind of was pushing it with OBVIOUS parallel when it’s revealed that Wilf’s female astronomy pen-pal has ALZHEIMER’S.

However, those teary bits are only really there at the beginning and end, the rest is something about a Mandragoran something or rather. (Which is apparently referring to something in the old series, which was also made rather obvious in the book.) And it's somewhat interesting but... yes, there is that actor-less characterisation going on which makes it a bit less exciting than it could've.

Comments

[fae-elric.livejournal.com]

Wilf~ <3 <3 <3 <3 I do love that old man terribly much.

[grass-angel.livejournal.com]

He discovers a star!
Which was admittedly a bit of shameless way to highlight the fact that 2009 was the year of astronomy.