Customer Reviews

Doctor Who: Wooden Heart (Doctor Who (BBC Hardcover))

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have just finished reading Wooden Heart by Martin Day and found it a refreshing addition to the Whoventures. Before reading this book I read The Stone Rose, The Resurrection Casket and Sick Building. This was the best of the four. Fantastic plot, great characters and flawless writing made this book, well, fantastic. It was not wracked by the pointlees and sometimes confusing slang that is the hallmark of some of the other writers (Justin Richards or Paul Magrs). The humor of the book takes quite a different angle because of this.

I have read quiet a few DW books, mostly New Adventures, and was wanting to find something similar to those books in the new series. This was as close as I have come.

Wooden Heart is one of the better Doctor Who novels that I've read. It was decent story that had you guessing which way it'd go. It was filled with humor, suspense, and heart. I enjoyed Wooden Heart and look forward to reading the other adventures with the Doctor and Martha.

Can there ever be balance between the good and the bad within us? Is not harming anybody the same as doing good? Is Evil a lack of good action? Or can you be good when you just keep to yourself?
The story is good, the characters are great, but the soul of this book is the question, what makes up good or evil, can there be a balance or will one side win over the other?

This one has the best cover, arguably - Martha does her Alicia Keyes impersonation, while the Doctor has his sonic locked and loaded. I thought this one started off slow, then got rolling as soon as our heroes enter this virtual forest world. The scenes with Martha tend to slow things down, but then the Doctor gets paired off with a litte girl that acts like a mini Rose Tyler and the ball gets rolling again. The twists keep coming even after the halfway mark. Not bad.

This is a book written on about a fifth grade reading level. And if you look at it that way, it's very good. It's creative and teaches a good life lesson (no one is perfect, no, not one). I didn't think it really showed Martha's personality very distinctly.

More ambitious than your average New Who book, Wooden Heart delivers a mind-bending premise that does its best to keep you guessing. Adjoa Andoh is a fun, engaging reader -- I would really like to hear her do another one or several of these. Every character is treated with a deft hand - from the Doctor and Martha to the various villagers. Plus, the book gets an extra star for referring to the Doctor as a trickster god -- in a surprisingly rich and textured scene. As is the case with all the New Who books I've read, I yearn for more meaningful character exploration. Regardless, Wooden Heart is clever and satisfying.

The story kept me guessing until the end. Very imaginative and a lot of fun.

The Doctor and Martha investigate a ship drifting in deep space. Apart from the bodies of the dead, the ship is empty. Or is it? Opening an ordinary hatch, they discover a whole other world, a place where simple villagers are plagued by monsters and where children disappear in the night.

The first two-thirds of this book is a bit bland. The isolated village in peril motif has been used before and it felt rather derivative to me. There is very little action--just a lot of aimless wandering as the Doctor and Martha explore first the spaceship and then the village and the surrounding forest.

The author made a big deal about Martha coming down with an ear infection and I kept waiting to see how it played into the overall plot. Turns out it didn't so I wonder why it was included in the first place.

However the book really comes alive in the last 85 pages. There is a sense of claustrophobic menace as the Doctor faces a dark force that is a literal embodiment of evil. The author waxes a bit philosophical, touching on the concepts of original sin, nature versus nurture and free will--not the normal stuff of throw-away TV tie-in books.

Bottom line, I really liked the premise of this book; I just wish it had been slightly better executed. It had to potential to be great. Sadly it turned out to be just ordinary.

I just recently finished this book and was not very impressed with it. The writing was not very memorable. It was written in a very bland language that I often find myself glossing over rather than reading every word and savoring it.

The characters were for the most part two-dimensional. The characters do develop through out the book but not too much. You would only learn a thing or two about them - even for the main characters, the Doctor and Martha - nothing more. Disappointingly, Martha was hardly useful in the story. She appeared as wooden as her acting was in the television series.

Also disappointing was how non-descriptive and generic the villain appeared in the story.

What annoys me about most of the New Series books is the inclusion of a child character, becoming a second-rate one-off companion and this book is no different. Take a look at "Prisoner of the Daleks" and you'd see that it's much better without having a child character being a "companion" -- though it does, albeit briefly, feature a child character.

Average book at its best.