Torchwood: The Men Who Sold The World

[beccaelizabeth]

Boring. Boring boring boring. Boring.
I have no interest in this Rex guy, he just runs around shouting and being shot at. He's not the protagonist, he gets nothing done and the whole story would have gone the same without him.
And it's one of those stupid books that think describing lots of different ways to kill people is somehow interesting. Like there's murder and secretly cooler murder.
Also it keeps killing children. If the book has no other way of demonstrating the stakes then it's pretty much fail. I mean if the only way people would be interested and worried is if it's children, fail.

It also gives me that wrong-genre feel, like this isn't a Torchwood book. It's all spies and soldiers and angry fighting with bonus betrayal. I was bored.

Presumably there's people who would want to read about angry shouty man following the action around and seeing lots of messy death. This book is for them, not me.

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

To be fair, Torchwood was having Jack allow children to be abducted by unstoppable evil fairies as early as the first half of the first season.

[beccaelizabeth]

That was saying something about children and their choices though. Like that they're tiny scary beings with an empathy shortage who laugh at the worst stuff. The story would have been very different if it didn't have a child in it.

Even Children of Earth, which iirc suffered rather from treating children as tiny motivations with no thinking of their own, would have had adults act very differently if it wasn't children involved.

This just had mass terrorism incidents, made worse because story focused on child deaths. Exactly the same things would happen with no children there, the story just seems to think the reader wouldn't care enough.

All too familiar (but not quite)

[ed_rex]

He's not the protagonist, he gets nothing done and the whole story would have gone the same without him.

Here, somehow, via LJ and a tab open long enough to forget exactly how. But I digress.

I actually thought you were writing about the television series, because your critique could easily apply to that atrocity, too, but the title sounded wrong. Took me a while to realize you were talking about a book that replicated most (if not all?) of the sins of the series.

Needless to say, I won't be reading it. (But speaking of the series, if you're interested, I reviewed the whole thing back in the day. I hope you don't mind the shameless self-promotion.)