Was a bit tricky to get into but I really enjoyed this story and really want an otter lol ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1454215.html

A fairly standard Ten / Martha adventure set in a near-future world where a small human colony is dealing with unseen monsters and cute little otter-like creatures. Interesting because Martha is knocked out for a chunk of the narrative, allowing the companion role to be distributed among several other characters. It's getting increasingly odd to read books with David Tennant's manic cheeky chappie at the same time as watching Matt Smith's alien young fogey (must try not doing two books and new episode in the same weekend too often). ( )

This is another Doctor Who novelisation, this time with Martha as the companion. In this one, the TARDIS lands on a planet called Sunday which is quite amusing considering the Doctor's later comment to Donna that he never lands on Sundays because he finds them boring. Not so this Sunday! The TARDIS ends up in a swamp where there's a creature who is extremly interested in the human colonists on the planet, but that's not all.

I found this book to be quite a good read and certainly kept me engrossed. I managed to finish it in three days flat which is some indication of how much I enjoyed it, I think. The characterisations of the Doctor and Martha are pretty good; this book has more of the manic Doctor but it's not overdone and does seem to capture him quite well. The supporting characters are possibly a little less rounded but still well-written and I think the character of Ty came out better than the rest. I do think the show book was stolen by the otters though. When they're introduced, it's pointed out that they're similar to Earth otters but with some marked differences. It's only discovered much later on exactly how marked these differences are and I certainly wasn't expecting them to be quite so different. I'm not sure whether it was just a tad too far-fetched but if it was, it didn't bother me or put me off. They were still very cute and it was such a shame that the only image of them was in my head.

The plot is typical Doctor Who fare - mysterious creature attacking the population and the companion gets captured within two seconds of the opening - but I think it's got a little twist in the way it's handled here. The creature in the swamp is particularly gruesome and there are some moments that made me think I probably should not be reading it before going to bed! I did wonder how Martha felt about spending a good portion of the book running around in nothing more than a hospital gown and badly fitting pair of slippers but it didn't seem to bother her. I think this was a pretty decent book, and a nice revist to Classic Who albeit in a New Who way. ( )

Another nice, quick Doctor Who read. This book is about the planet Sunday, recently colonized by some advance settlers in preparation for more to come, when their town is hit with a giant tidal wave caused by a meteor. The Doctor and Martha arrive in the TARDIS after this event, but the TARDIS slips down into the muck with Martha still inside. The Doctor finds the locals but unbeknownst to him Martha is taken as she attempts to leave the TARDIS while it is underwater by a great, black tentacle. The
Doctor ends up finguring things out, what the tentacle belongs to, and with the help of the local fauna (small, otter-like beings) they foil a plot that would destroy the new colony. ( )

A big fan of M. Michalowski's other Doctor Who novels, I plunked down my 13 bucks and wrung my grubby palms in anticipation. I had some reservations regarding the NSA's as I had heard they were written for younger readers than the previous lines of Doctor Who novels (though this is disputed by some). If this instillation is typical - my fears were founded, and I should have resisted the book (at least until a used copy found its way to me).
Without giving too much away, the book features cute fuzzy otter beings that are sometimes sweet to human settlers and sometimes threatening. I'm tempted to say that is the long and short of the whole piece, but there were some interesting 'settlers under siege' moments, and a slightly more complex plot than 'sometimes otters... they don't like you so much'.
If you like your Doctor Who with a little more sci-fi substance, character and plot, save yourself the mild disappointment and head straight for Relative Dimentias (one of my favorite all-time Doctor Who novels, and written by Michalowski). ( )