Time for another book! We are going to read together Martha in the Mirror
Please discuss below - no need to finish it first, discuss as you go along but please add spoiler tags!
If you’ve previously read the book and want to join in the discussion, that’s great too!
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My first time doing book club - I was looking for a new audiobook and this one came up at the perfect time! (Do audiobooks count? I’m counting it).
I enjoyed this one, I haven’t dipped my toe in many DW books but this was a good lark, a little spooky (but strange children usually are), and a pretty solid concept with great banter between 10 & Martha.
There are no rules. You can definitely participate by listening to the audiobooks if you wish :)
Ooh, I’ve been wanting to try a Martha book, and I’m currently between Doctor Who novels… this timing feels very fortuitous. 
The book manages to use the people made of glass, or basically a glass-like substance to get away with things that would be too gory for the younger demographic with flesh and blood characters, especially in the climax. These books generally would avoid something like a flesh and blood severed hand.
The Obligatory Child Character is handled better here than other books do.
Cool cover, with Martha and her reflection in different positions.
Finished this last night and really enjoyed it. (As evidenced by the fact that I already finished it — I was anticipating that it would be my bus commute reading material for the next week or two, but then I got so invested that I didn’t want to wait that long!) Exactly the right amount of creepy for my tastes without feeling gratuitous about it. The descriptions were good and evocative, the concepts and plot were both interesting. I saw some of the twists/reveals coming, but only in the positive “excellent setup/foreshadowing!” sense; and then there were others that I didn’t anticipate but that — once revealed — made a bunch of niggling, just-slightly-off details all click into place in the most satisfying of ways.
But the Doctor and Martha’s dynamic has to have been my favorite part of it all. They felt so very themselves, and the humorous moments and constant banter and wordplay helped lighten up what could otherwise have been a pretty dark atmosphere.
This was my first NSA, but if the others are nearly as good, I definitely need to read more!
I thought that this was pretty good, a fun setting. The Doctor and Martha were greatly written. It also helped the story that Freema Agyeman did the narration for the audiobook.
I was actually a little worried going into this because I was afraid Martha would be relegated to a damsel in distress trapped in a mirror where the Doctor’s main goal was to save her. I ended up enjoying it though. I liked the side characters, Janna was interesting and Bott and Bill were an absolute joy. I also was amused by the reference of the dark smiths and how that plays into the darksmith legacy books.
Overall I thought it had an interesting plot and some fantastic moments for Martha and the Doctor.
I really liked this one, it was very easy for me to visualise, with lots of cool concepts. Fairly simple, but well-written.
I have started the audio book and am reading the book along with it, but for some reason a lot of sentences are being skipped over. Is that normal?
The audiobook is probably abridged. Most of the NSA audiobooks were.
The NSA audiobooks were abridged for quite some time, meaning that they were shortened so that they could fit into the limited storage space on a CD. That’s why it’s jumping over less relevant sentences and sections and just keeping the core of the story.
They moved to complete, unabridged audiobooks at some point, and that’s the norm these days. There are no unabridged versions of these early ones, though.
Ohhh I see, thank you!
It was around the point they got onto the 2009 books where the Tenth Doctor was solo after Journey’s End when the readings got unabridged. The audiobook readings started with the Tenth Doctor New Series Adventures novels, so when the Ninth Doctor novels got the treatment they were unabridged. The Story of Martha had the short stories, framed in the book version as stories Martha tells about the Doctor (this being The Year That Never Was), released as separate downloads.
Thanks for the clarification!