The book is presented as being part oral history, part critical analysis and part fan notes. Unfortunately it misses the mark in all of those areas. The book starts after its prologue with an interview with Stacey Abrams who is a big fan of the show. It was a bit surprising to start the book with that but why not ? Stacey has a personal connection with Sarah Michelle Gellar and also has (had?) one with Whedon. I also chuckled a bit when seeing that no questions about Whedon recent controversies had been asked to Stacey. The second part which takes around half of book is a partial summary of the seven seasons of the show. If you have seen the show (and if you haven’t I don’t see why you would read this book first which has many spoilers) you don’t really need this summary.. But the worst is that this part is really messy and in dire needs of an editor, There are some typos and some sentences are clearly off. Maybe some of those issues are linked to the fact that the book was « rebooted » after Carpenter’s allegations but still it was sometimes difficult to read. There is a lot of self inserting by the author Evan who kept giving his opinion on everything and it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. (Ironically the author has a podcast called « Shut Up Evan » which is exactly what I wanted to yell when reading this part) What was a lot better were the numerous interviews with cast and crews sharing many interesting details. Special mention to Danny Strong and Marc Blucas who are two actors we don’t hear about often enough. Unfortunately to find those interesting bits you have to navigate through Evan endless babbling. Then come the chapter « The Joss of it all«  which summarized the recent allegations against Whedon and the cast reaction on social media. This don’t give much additional knowledge if you have read the article from Variety. The following chapters taclkle important subjects like race issue or feminism. Those are tough but really important subjects to discuss and the way it was done was a big disappointment. You can’t just look at a show which started 25 years ago with 2021’s googles. It is really critical in order to do a meaningful analysis to first recontextualize properly. For example by looking at what was done for other shows which aired at the same period. Instead of that we got unknown people called « fans » who gave their opinions I didn’t care about and an author who was a lot more interested with pushing his narrative and virtue signaling than doing a proper analysis. Again some cast members interviews were really good but few and far between. It seems that Evan sometimes also tries to emulate Buffy snappy comeback from the show when doing some of his remarks but unlike the show it usually fails flat. The remaining chapters raised a bit more the level with a one full of fanboy gushing towards Sarah Michelle Gellar. It could probably have been done a bit more professionally but I think it was needed as I have the feeling that Sarah didn’t always get the credits she deserved for her wonderful work on Buffy. By gathering all those testimonies of people who worked with Gellar, Evan really delivered on this topic. The last chapter shared some interesting facts like some insight on the rumored Boreanaz/Brendon feud. Nonetheless I was a bit surprised that for all the time spent on Whedon’s controversies some others like the one with Jeff Pruitt/Sophia Crawford or Hannigan claiming that she learned about the end of Buffy in Entertainement Weekly were completely ignored in the book. To conclude I was really frustrated by this book. Between the fact that the book came after Carpenter’s allegation and the fact that the author is close to SMG, this book had the potential to really bring something new and fresh compared to the numerous books already written about the show. Instead we got this one which is not without any merits but full of bias and impaired by its sloppy writing and structure. It would have been a lot better and more interesting to just have all the interviews unedited instead of all this bloat. So it’s one star for some really interesting interviews and a second one for all the SMG’s love.