Customer Reviews

The Book of Fours (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Like I said, a bit complicated. But let us not dwell on its complicatedness. First the good bits. The plot for a start. Its so perfectly 'Buffy' that they could have based an entire season of the TV show around it. It jumps on you right from the prologue (which, by the way, is one of the best bits) and doesn't let up. The flashbacks are (whilst slightly too numerous) beautifully written and provide a great insight into slayers of the past and present, something which the show has failed to do a lot of the time.

However the slight downside to this book is that it requires the reader to keep his or her concentraition levels at level that resembles Buddhist monks. If they don't the result is nausea followed by bleeding from the ears followed by sudden cranial explosion, (or you might just lose the plot, which is also irritating). This especially true of the final chapter which I had to read 4 times before I got the jist of it.

So in conclusion, a super good read which I am happy to award 5 stars.

Oh wait, hang on. Oh yeah, half a star off for unnecessary over complication and half a star off for the really bad Seth Green joke which contained all the subtlety of being hit in the face with a sledgehammer.

As always Nancy Holder delivers an action packed story. The Book of Fours is a complex tale of slayers past and present. A great evil the Gatherer sends out his wanderers of fire, water, air and earth to kill the slayers. His victory will end the line of slayers forever.

There are many elements to recommend this book to readers. The plot is interesting. Set in the time frame of the third season, Angel and Buffy are still together. Ms Holder has provided the tortured couple some lovely moments. Buffy and Faith take on some unique monsters as the story begins. The description of this particular battle is not to be read on a full stomach. It is both exciting and terribly humorous. The author also details the evil as it grows from nothingness to a great power with the help of a flea and a sparrow. It is almost poetic. The final battle is vivid. The action is heart stopping.

I can't give this novel five stars because for everything I enjoyed about it I found that it had too many characters, too many subplots, and too many flash backs. This is the first book of the Buffy the Vampire Series that I can only recommend to fans who have seen the television series or who have read the excellent Gatekeeper's Trilogy co-authored by the same author. Someone new to the tale of the chosen one, the mythology of the slayer would be confused or not understand the full impact of the plot.

We're used to strange events in Sunnydale, but the latest problems make it doubtful that there will be a Sunnydale in the near future. An unstoppable forest fire, hurricanes, downtown tidal waves and a gratuitous earthquake pummel the unlucky city, and the Slayer and her faithful companions begin to smell a rat, or several rats. Buffy, Faith (appearing for the first time) and even poor Willow find themselves having nightmares, the very same nightmares. And the keep running into very irritated mummies with unpleasantly sharp axes.

Giles investigates and realizes that a universal bad hair day is in the works. The mummies are called the Wanderers, serving a prehistoric evil known as the Gatherer. To make matters worse, a voodoo queen and a gangster demon are also chasing Slayers. Not just the two current slayers, but their immediate predecessors India Cohen and Kendra become tangled up in the demonic plot. Even Willow and Cordelia must become directly involved in what becomes a titanic struggle to prevent the Gatherer from conquering Sunnydale and the rest of the world.

This is a complex plot, rich in parallel threads and frantic action. Perhaps a bit too complex. Prepare to have to pay attention. No one is quite who they seem to be and our young heroines must face magic and betrayal before they can confront their opponents.

Lately some of the Buffy chronicles have been slightly short on plot, but Nancy Holder has served up one of her best. At a time when the television series seems bogged down in one tragedy after another, it's a true relief to settle down with a Buffy story that is about the strength and courage that is the hallmark of Buffy and her companions.

The book provides a great mix of story and Slayer lore that will delight all fans. Despite the many zigzags taken by the plot, Holder manages to keep everything working together. This one's a keeper. Hopefully the author will figure out how to put Sunnydale back together again in time for the next novel.

Let me begin by saying I believe Nancy Holder(along with Christopher Golden) to be among the best original Buffy novel writers. The Book of Fours explores in depth some of the more recent Slayer history that the show has of yet not delved into. It starts with Buffy and Faith sharing disturbing dreams of an ancient and powerful enemy-the Gatherer. The Gatherer deals with the four elements: air, water, fire , and earth-which also leads to very interesting background on the Slayers' powers. It leads Buffy to explore more of the history of her predessor(India Cohen) and how India's final battle led to Buffy being "called" and how India's killer is setting its sights on Buffy and Faith. This is very interesting because the show has never dealt with the Slayer before Buffy. The story also includes Buffy's immediate successor(and Faith's predessor), Kendra. Buffy and Faith must band together with their Slayer ancestors(and friends) in order to defeat this enemy that could stop the Slayer line forever.

While this story was very exciting(I confess I finished it one day), it only gets four stars instead of five for a couple reasons. One, in order to understand some of the story not only must you have watched the show, but you have to have read the Gatekeeper triology as well as the Spike & Dru: Pretty Maids... book. Two, this book constantly changes back and forth between past and present and between many, many characters. It makes it a little confusing. Third, the plot is very convulted with describing the enemy and how it came about. Very long and just a tad boring. Not to mention that the book is a little darker than the show is. Fourth, there are a couple little inconsistencies. For instance I though Kendra's watcher was refered to as Sam Zabuto in the What's My Line episode. In the book he is referred to as Roger Zabuto.

However, for the most part this is a great book, fairly consistent with Joss Whedon's vision. Holder does a great job bringing Faith's character(before she went bad) to life. That is just how I imagined her in scenes not shown on the show. Holder also does a good job bringing the complex yet loving relationship of Buffy and Angel to life. Their few scenes together are great and any fan of this duo will love them. Nancy Holder does a good job and this book will be a treat for any Buffy fan.

I have been waiting a long time for some sort of story line involving the Slayer before Buffy. The good news about "The Book of Fours" is that India Cohen is a character in Nancy Holder's latest Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel. The bad news is that it is hard to work too much about India into the novel because we when it comes to Slayers past and present we also have Faith and Kendra, not to mention Lucy Hanover roaming around the Ghost Roads. "The Book of Fours" takes place during the first half of the third season of Buffy, before Faith turns into a rogue Slayer. After one of her L.A. classmates dies and Willow is severely injured in a car accident, Buffy is forced to deal with the mortality of her friends. The ante is upped when Buffy and Faith both begin dreaming about strangely swathed figures carrying horrific boxes across a desert. Eventually the villains this time around are revealed to be the Gatherers and their representative on earth, the sorceress Cecile Lafitte, in yet another human minion spending centuries trying to bring their evil overlords to Earth, while Sunnydale is best by an elemental onslaught of earthquakes, floods, hurricane winds and fires. In the end it will take four Slayers to fight the big bad evil brewing in Sunnydale.

Ultimately, all of the other Slayers receive rather short shrift in this novel. The story with India was that she was in love with her Watcher and he with her, but they never got around to telling each other let alone do anything about it. The idea of Christopher "Kit" Bothwell, India's Watcher, being haunted by the death of his Slayer is a solid idea but gets somewhat lost in all the other activities in the book. Neither Buffy nor Giles have any strong reactions either to the forbidden love or the inevitable death of the Slayer raised by the story of India and Kit. Faith is just there, the building tension with Buffy implicit but not really developed; there is not any real reason this story has to be told at that particular point in the Buffy chronology. One of the themes of this novel is what it means to be a Slayer, but Buffy and Faith never get around to any serious discussion of their obviously different takes on what is happening and what it all means. Kendra is basically tacked onto the story, being the necessary fourth for the novel's climax. But if there is very little to the meeting of Buffy and her predecessor India, there is even less with Faith and Kendra. These should be monumental moments and they pass without much consequence, although Holder creates a nice moment where Buffy sees the shade of the Slayer yet to come. The book touches on the unique circumstance of having two Slayers at the same time, but does not pursue it; at some point this needs to be worked out, because having more than one Slayer either means the powers of the Slayer are diluted or suggests you have the potential for creating an army of Slayers with just a bit of mad scientist creativity.

One of the strengths of this novel is that Holder continues to work in the Ghost Roads and some of the other characters and details from the Gatekeeper Trilogy, which remains the best of the Buffy original novels. One of the new ideas introduced is that each Slayer represents a basic element: India-water, Buffy-air, Kendra-earth, Faith-Fire. This is certainly interesting idea raising all sorts of questions: Will the next Slayer represent water? Is the order always the same, and if so, what significance might it have? How exactly do the Slayers match up with their respective elements? In "The Book of Fours" this idea becomes rather cumbersome: there are four axes, each of which matches up with an element and which will instantly slay the corresponding Slayer with but a touch, a weird sort of Russian Roulette version to slaying the slayer with a 1-in-4 chance you have the right ax for the right Slayer. However, the point here is simply to justify having the four Slayers stand together (with Willow and Cordelia serving as the human hosts for India and Kendra).

The more I think about it the more I wish "The Book of Four" had been four books, each focusing on one of the four slayers, each volume adding another piece to the puzzle. Certainly Holder does not suffer from a lack of good ideas, but there is just too much worth pursuing crammed into this one (there are a couple of subplots involving Xander's cousin and Micaela Tomassi that disappear for most of the book and suddenly pop up at the end again). Her ideas for Buffy's predecessor were worth developing a lot more than she had time/pages to do in this book. The story of the Slayer before Buffy should have been a great tale to be told, but "The Book of Fours" is merely good. Most readers will find it enjoyable, but somewhat disappointing given "what might have been."

In 1993, India Cohen was fifteen years old. She had just arrived in Japan, where her Navy father had been transferred. She had her whole life ahead of her. That all changed one dark night, when she met Christopher Bothwell, who told India that she was the Slayer, chosen by fate to fight vampires and demons until the day she died. That day came in 1997. And as fate chose India, so it chose the girl who would follow her as Slayer - Buffy Summers. Now Buffy and Faith - the second Slayer, the freak accident, who succeeds Kendra, made Slayer when Buffy died and was revived - are having nightmares. Sunnydale is bombarded by the four elements - a raging fire, a devastating hurricane, a powerful earthquake, and a deadly flood. Buffy and Faith fear the worst - the end of the world may be near. To stop it, Buffy and Faith won't have to just work with each other, but with the Slayers that came before them, who lost their lives to the same evil that now threatens the world. This is one enemy Buffy and Faith may not be strong enough to defeat. But they will have to. Because the world is counting on them. This was an excellent new Buffy novel, one of my favorites. Nancy Holder has written an exciting, thrill-a-minute adventure.

Unlike Immortal and the Gatekeeper Trilogy, which Nancy Holder co-wrote with Christopher Golden, The Book of Fours has a notable lack of focus about it.

The plot itself is good and most of the original characters are interesting, particularly India and Kit, they slayer and watcher previous to Buffy and Giles. However, the sub-plots are thin and plentiful making the story feel incredibly unfocused and the main plot jumps around too much. I have the distinct impression that much of the story cut in the editing process.

There are more characters in this book than in most soap-opera series on television, which also makes the book hard to follow. The original characters probably outnumber the characters from the series (which include many semi-regulars such as Spike, Dru, Willy the Snitch, Angel, Faith, Kendra and the Master, among others) and Holder gives back story on every single one of them, which detracts from the plot a great deal. In addition, characters from previous books make apperances and if you haven't read the Gatekeeper Trilogy and Pretty Maids All in a Row, you will be lost.

There are a few great one-liners in the story, one in particular dealing with a surfboard really cracked me up, but again they aren't as plentiful as in her earlier works and much of the Buffy-lingo seems forced.

The best part about this book, however, is the promise of a follow-up story dealing more in-depth with India and Kit, the former slayer and watcher with a forbidden love. I'm looking forward to it and I'm hopeful that next time the editor will do a better job of molding the text into a memorable and enjoyable book.

THE BOOK OF FOURS sat on my shelves unread for two months because I was afraid it would contain the same major flaw that marred the otherwise excellent THE EVIL THAT MEN DO. It does. No the book isn't too complex, there aren't too many characters, too many subplots, or too many flashbacks. Frankly, I liked the part about Xander's cousin because it gave Xander (the token "normal" of the Scooby Gang), another chance to let the true nobility of his character shine. The problem with both books is that Ms. Holder seems to forget that she's writing entries in a series, not one-shots. Both books have far too much death and destruction going on in Sunnydale for a series. Enough happens to Sunnydale in this one to have it declared a Federal Disaster Area and take years to pull itself back together. In fact, if not for some little hints in the last few pages, I'd be expecting the entire planet to have been rocked back to the Stone Age by the Gatherer's power. It's a shame, because other than this flaw, Ms. Holder is one of the best writers of Buffy books and this is a very worthy effort. I do agree with other reviewers who recommend that you read the Gatehouse Trilogy and PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW before this book, but not because you need to have read them in order to understand THE BOOK OF FOURS. I think you should read them first because this book contains "spoilers" for them. Now I wish I had ready PRETTY MAIDS first. I look forward to the story of how Buffy will free India even if Ms. Holder doesn't tone the disasters down to a believable level. Her writing is compelling enough to keep me going even while I gritting my teeth.

this is one very cool book. sunnydale has always been known for it's disastors because of it's proximity to the hellmouth. but when everything from earthquakes, hurricanes, and forrest fires start raging against the town all at the same time, giles goes into research mode. they come to find out that an ancient evil has been brought to sunnydale. his minions are called the wanders. they each possess an axe that is used to kill slayers. one wanderer is of air, fire, earth and water. as buffy is the slayer of air and faith is the slayer of fire, the ancient evil called the gatherer will be unstoppable if both slayers are killed because no more slayers will be called ever. this leads giles to the conclusion that they need the spirits of the last 2 slayers which was kendra(slayer of earth) and india cohen(buffy's predessor and slayer of water). they perform a ritual where kendra possesses cordelia's body and india posseses willow's body to try and stop this evil from ruling the earth. this book has a lot of twist and turns in it and a lot of history lessons. it was a great read and i would highly reccomend it to all buffy fans. it was also great to see a book with faith and buffy working together. most authors seem to avoid faith. i don't know why. she was one of the best characters on buffy besides angel of course.

I wish there were a 3.5 rating because this book is a solid "C". It has an interesting plot and some great moments, but is a little loose in the dialogue and suffers from periodic bouts of disjointed pacing. It's like a star running back recovering from a torn ligament. There's a lot of solid muscle and talent there, but with the connectve tissue damaged he just can't play up to his former potential. He's still better than most of other guys, but slowed down just enough to level the playing field a bit.

I have enjoyed Ms. Holders books in the past, especially those written with Chris Golden. That may be the reason I am a little disappointed here. This is a good book that has some incredible siblings that came before it. I tend to think that one more revision or possibly a stronger editor could have lifted this work to the same level as those that came before.

It is definately worth a read, especially for die hard Buffy Fans, but if you really want a great Slayer book(s) check out the Gatekeeper Trilogy. It includes all of the best that Book of Fours has to offer wrapped in a tighter package.