DOCTOR WHO: THE DROSTEN’S CURSE by A.L. Kennedy

Broadway Books

July 14^th, 2015

978-0-553-41944-3

Science Fiction, Action & Adventure

Paperback

Reviewed by Dawn (love2read28@gmail.com)
Obtained by Blogging for Books

3 Hearts

On Arbroath, something strange is going on. Golfers are disappearing, people are hearing other people’s thoughts and then there is the strange grandchildren of the equally weird Mrs. Fetch, who owns the local hotel. Whatever is going on here, the Doctor will figure it out, with the help of the hotel junior receptionist, Bryony. But something alien and ancient is awakening and it is up to the Doctor to find a way to stop it before it is too late.

I love the new version of Doctor Who and with this installment, we get to take an adventure with the Fourth Doctor, who was played by Tom Baker on the show and I got to admit, it was a fun yet confusing story to read. THE DROSTEN’S CURSE is my first foray into the older (now classic) doctors and I got to admit the author did a bang up job in capturing the Doctor’s personality within the pages. This doctor has some levels of psychotic wonder and awe in his travels and the author does a great job in capturing that as well as his emotions within the story. As I haven’t read any of the classic Doctor Who stories with the older Doctors, this was a slight departure for me. The story is at times creepy and suspenseful yet you can’t help but wonder when the Doctor will figure it all out. It had a nice suspense filled emotion going through the whole book, especially when you have portions where you were going ‘WHAT?’ in that scared high pitch voice. This would have been even better if it was a dark and stormy night, in my opinion, just to up the creepy factor a bit.

The downside I found with this latest book in the Doctor Whology is the pacing at times went from manically fast to slower than a turtle. There was no happy medium and I got a sense of the author trying to fit a lot of things in the story as they could while keeping true to the world that is Doctor Who. There are a lot of details within THE DROSTEN’S CURSE, so many that the story gets lost at times within details we didn’t need to know and there are a lot of characters here, so many it felt like I needed a scorecard to keep track of them all. All those characters and details kept cluttering up the story at times and took me out of the story, which was not what I enjoy when I read a new book.

THE DROSTEN’S CURSE is a hit or a miss for me. I loved it had captured the essence of the fourth Doctor yet the story itself kept bouncing all over the place. As much as I wanted to rate this book higher, I just couldn’t due to the mixed bag of story pacing that went from one extreme to another to way more characters than needed. If you enjoy classic Doctor Who then you might enjoy a trip with the fourth Doctor. Unfortunately for me, THE DROSTEN’S CURSE wasn’t quite the grand adventure as I would have liked.

This is an objective review and not an endorsement