Christopher Golden

After reading a few books by Christopher Golden one has to wonder about the women in his life......every female character I've encountered so far in his work is extremely self centered, controlling, demanding and annoying......is this how he believes women to be? Are the women he has experience with this way? Meanwhile, the men are weak and overly obliging of the women, to the point of often being taken advantage of. This trend tends to ruin his otherwise good story plots.

Unfortunately, this was true to that pattern......The characters here are Thomas, the writer of Strangewood, his ex Emily, their son Nathan, and Emily's new boyfriend Joe.
Thomas feels the need to worry more about Emily than his son at some points......and Joe is willing to tolerate her abusive and dismissive behavior for the sake of being in Emilys presence. Emily's hypocrisy and self serving attitude makes her hard to stomache....example: she finds it perfectly acceptable to attack Thomas for going home to shower and not coming back soon enough....or coming to her home to talk and leaving Nathan alone at the hospital.....but its fine for her to stay overnight at Joe's. The focus on their dynamics and relationship issues distracted from the heart of the story......which should have been about Nathan and Strangewood.

Strangewood is Alice and Wonderland meets The thief of always and Travels to Oz....the inhabitants are delightful. I wish the book had primarily taken place here....you end up feeling as though you were hardly in Strangewood at all.....not acceptable for the books namesake. The ending was disappointing to say the least. This story could have been so much more..

All in all.....it was an ok read.....the parts that take place in Strangewood and the creative characters that reside there were the only saving grace.… (more)

Many aspects of this felt and read like a real Buffy episode, such as each characters quirks, the dialogue, and just the overall atmosphere. I could really see this playing out in front of me - everything from the Renaissance Festival to the final showdown. Golden has done a solid job of capturing the characters and their personalities.

That being said, boy oh BOY could this book deal with some paring down and editing! It just keeps going and going and going and going... at some point it starts to feel like everyone is trapped in an endless loop of standing around talking, getting capturing, driving in circles, and inner monologuing. Also, there are so many random asides from secondary and even tertiary characters that add nothing to the story: like do we really need three pages on how Xander's mom still sleepwalks and smokes and eats leftover chicken wings? No. No we do not.

It was a fun read, and I particularly enjoyed the moments where the reader is directly in Cordelia's head, but nothing that was a big standout. I have the Gatekeeper Trilogy on hand to read next, so here's hoping that one is a little more cleaned up!… (more)