This was better than I expected based on the book's reputation, but not particularly good. The Doctor and his companions investigate children disappearing in post-Great War Europe, and of course it's aliens fighting an interminable war who need recruits. Nice atmosphere, and Chris and Roz got a lot of interesting stuff to do, but Benny was wasted, and the story went to some pretty banal places.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2107520.html

Leonard has the Seventh Doctor, Benny, Chris and Roz encountering an alien computer which is kidnapping children in 1919 to turn them into perfect soldiers. Even in 1995, when this was published, this must have seemed a desperate attempt to rewrite The War Games; the first season Sarah Jane story Warriors of Kudlak takes the same rather improbable wrinkle of using children but does it far far better. The premise is weak, the violence is nasty and gratuitous, and the evil computer is persuaded to see the error of its ways after hearing three sentences from the Doctor. ( )

The year is 1919, and aliens who look like oversized teddy bears are using actual teddy bears in a plot to kidnap human children to serve as soldiers in a mysterious, surprisingly low-tech war. It sounds like a ludicrous premise, even for Doctor Who, but it's played absolutely straight, and there's nothing laughable about it at all. Ultimately, it's something of a commentary on the pointless loss of young life in WWI, and it doesn't stint on the brutality.

It does work better than you'd expect. Watching the plot unfold isn't quite as exciting as it might have been, though, and I think it would be nice to have a little more of the Doctor in a series of which he is ostensibly the main character. But it's not bad. I think I liked it better than most of the NAs I've read lately. ( )