Happy New Year!
Time for another book! We are going to read together The Price of Paradise
Please discuss below - no need to finish it first, discuss as you go along but please add spoiler tags for anything that could be considered a spoiler!
If you’ve previously read the book and want to join in the discussion, that’s great too!
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Just for fun, add your rating here:
Read this last month, and I’d like to say to everyone, it is a much better read than Art of Destruction!
I wanted to join the Book Club at least once so I got this on eBay for $5. I have previously only read Apollo 23 and Touched by an Angel with the Eleventh Doctor.
I thought this was fine. It was a quick read, but I don’t particularly like Rose. I would have appreciated a more concrete explanation around the Witiku rather than just the environmental symbolism and message.
I will say, I only made it 64% of the way through this book (thank you Libby app), so maybe it did a complete 180 in terms of characterization and story in the last bit and I just didn’t get to it. But I really didn’t feel like finishing this book. I’ve been trying to read all of these novels, and so far out of the 26 I’ve read this is one of only two I’ve left unfinished.
I really don’t like to talk about books in a way that makes it sound like they’re just objectively bad, because I know that every book out there is somebody’s favorite, so I hope this doesn’t come off like that. Just for me personally, this was probably one of my least favorite in the series. To me Rose felt very OOC. This was the only book where she actively got on my nerves. Her and the doctor were split up for a lot of the book. I found his parts kind of boring, and her parts a slog to get through. Brake’s direct comparison to Native Americans was also weird to me. I know this was an early 2000s book, but the repetition of the “mystical native/dangerous savage” trope got on my nerves.
Realised I wrote a review for this back in the day and as a consequence dropped my rating to 2.5/5. It’s not a great story.
The NSAs are WILDLY hit or miss. There are a few books (not many) that I gave up on, and a few that are up there with my favorite doctor who media full stop. I can’t wait for us to read The Eyeless Beautiful and Beautiful Chaos. It’s going to be a long time though, they’re some of the last tenth doctor ones.
I actually enjoyed this a bit. It was an interesting premise with a planet that gets allergic to people. Ten and Rose was okay. I listened to the audiobook and thought that it had a good narrator.
I’m halfway through the audiobook myself and… yeah. It’s not a very memorable one. Mostly just a bunch of Doctor Who tropes cobbled together, but let’s see how the second half develops the story.
Now this was a good one!
Literally I could talk about that book for hours. That and In the Blood, although it’s not technically an NSA.
Okay, so the audiobook version of this, narrated by Shaun Dingwall, was perfectly okay. Nothing more, nothing less. It is formulaic, very safe, and not particularly engaging. Ten and Rose weren’t too bad and the other characters remained very forgettable.
I guess the best part is the general concept of a sentient planet allergic to offworlders, but even that feels a bit underutilised.
6/10