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A review by kribu
Doctor Who: Time Trips by A.L. Kennedy, Joanne Harris, Trudi Canavan, Jenny T. Colgan, Stella Duffy, Jake Arnott, Nick Harkaway, Cecelia Ahern
3.0
This is one of those times that I wish I could rate the book, as an object, separately from its contents.
Because this is one lovely hardback. Double-page opening illustrations for each story, the dark blue edges of the pages, and of course the main draw of the hardback for those, like me, who'd already bought - and read - all or most of the individual stories as they were originally released as ebooks: the wrap-around dust jacket, containing an additional, exclusive, heavily illustrated (very) short Twelve & Clara story.
It's a gorgeous book, and while it took me a while to decide to buy it, because it wasn't cheap, I'd already bought and read all but one of the inside stories, and didn't really care for most of them. But hey, pretty book and some "official" Twelve & Clara in this excruciatingly long eight-month wait between series 8 and 9? How could I resist.
Anyway. I've rated & reviewed most of the stories before, so I'm not going to bother doing it again, especially as I didn't re-read them - I'll just say that they ranged from "urgh, awful" to "pretty decent", with mostly "meh". I'm glad to say that the one I hadn't read before, Anti-Hero by Stella Duffy (a Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe story), was more towards the "pretty decent" end of that scale, being .. well, basically a rather nice short story, even though it suffered from what 99% of DW short stories I've read in the last few years suffer from - a good start, nicely building up the story, establishing the location and characters, rolling onwards at a nice pace, and then ... suddenly, the end. Blegh. I don't like short stories, really.
The dust jacket story is really very short (500 words, maybe? I didn't count - it took me too much effort to just unwrap the cover and keep turning it around to find all the bits in the right order, but that was a lot of fun really! - but yeah, it's definitely a short story, considering it has to fit inside a dust jacket with lots of illustrations) but it was a cool little vignette and I enjoyed it. You don't really lose much for not reading it, but I really don't regret getting the book for it.
Because this is one lovely hardback. Double-page opening illustrations for each story, the dark blue edges of the pages, and of course the main draw of the hardback for those, like me, who'd already bought - and read - all or most of the individual stories as they were originally released as ebooks: the wrap-around dust jacket, containing an additional, exclusive, heavily illustrated (very) short Twelve & Clara story.
It's a gorgeous book, and while it took me a while to decide to buy it, because it wasn't cheap, I'd already bought and read all but one of the inside stories, and didn't really care for most of them. But hey, pretty book and some "official" Twelve & Clara in this excruciatingly long eight-month wait between series 8 and 9? How could I resist.
Anyway. I've rated & reviewed most of the stories before, so I'm not going to bother doing it again, especially as I didn't re-read them - I'll just say that they ranged from "urgh, awful" to "pretty decent", with mostly "meh". I'm glad to say that the one I hadn't read before, Anti-Hero by Stella Duffy (a Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe story), was more towards the "pretty decent" end of that scale, being .. well, basically a rather nice short story, even though it suffered from what 99% of DW short stories I've read in the last few years suffer from - a good start, nicely building up the story, establishing the location and characters, rolling onwards at a nice pace, and then ... suddenly, the end. Blegh. I don't like short stories, really.
The dust jacket story is really very short (500 words, maybe? I didn't count - it took me too much effort to just unwrap the cover and keep turning it around to find all the bits in the right order, but that was a lot of fun really! - but yeah, it's definitely a short story, considering it has to fit inside a dust jacket with lots of illustrations) but it was a cool little vignette and I enjoyed it. You don't really lose much for not reading it, but I really don't regret getting the book for it.