First of all, I would like to make a confession: although I
had heard of Doctor Who, I had never seen nor read anything
on this legendary British character, so why not try this
short novella written by no less than Cecelia Ahern.
Here
we have the tenth Doctor Who who lands on the planet Cashel
and right in the middle of a war. He first meets the lovely
Ash, a bog princess, along with a 10 year-old boy named
Root, and later on their friends Mossy and Coalette, among
others in a wonderful cast of secondary characters. Prince
Zircon and Ash are in love, but the evil Queen Xenotime
will not hear of it as it would compromise her reign of
terror on the ever suffering bog people. Those unfortunate
creatures, whom we might think of as zombies, but the
Doctor has a perfectly sensible explanation for their sorry
state. The bog people are treated as slaves by Queen
Xenotime who intends to do everything in her power that
nothing changes.
And we're off on this extraordinary adventure that is
DOCTOR WHO: THE BOG WARRIOR. The story is a oh-so-very-
loosely retelling of Cinderella sprinkled with a dash of
the Wizard of Oz: a pair of diamond-incrusted shoes must be
found before midnight or Prince Zircon will die, and to
remain incognito, the good Doctor must don at some point an
outrageous costume that has him flummoxed!
Although DOCTOR WHO: THE BOG WARRIOR is a
very short novella, there are no loose ends and it's of
course very well written. I'm not sure anything would have
prepared me for this, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
DOCTOR WHO: THE BOG WARRIOR, I'm sure will delight fans of
the Doctor, and for those of us who hadn't read anything,
it's a delightful way to meet one of the incarnations of
the Doctor. Much fun was had by this reader indeed!
Arriving on the planet Cashel, the Tenth Doctor witnesses a strange masked ball. To guarantee peace, Prince Zircon has to choose a bride from the Bog People - dead men and women who have been resurrected as slaves. Or as warriors. But Zircon is in love with the enslaved Princess Ash, whose parents were deposed and executed by the current Queen. As usual, the Doctor has walked right into trouble, and it's up to him to sort it out.