Tommy DonbavandReseñas
Autor de Shroud of Sorrow
Reseñas
Shroud of Sorrow (Doctor Who) (Dr Who) por Tommy Donbavand
I liked the setting of this story; Doctor Who stories that run concurrently to famous historical events are interesting to me. The Shroud reminded me a bit of the creatures in “Flatline”, but of course with Eleven at the controls of the Tardis instead of Twelve.
I found Clara more annoying than usual in this book, and that’s saying something because I always find Clara annoying :) The writing was OK but not great; definitely more of a borrow than a buy for me.
Cleo is a mummy, but Luke has convinced her to go as a witch. He's trying to convince Resus (the normal member of a family that has been vampires for generations), to go as Harry Potter. Okay, Mr. Donbavand doesn't come right out and name the wizard, but from questions in chapters one and seven, we know it's Harry. Luke is going as a skeleton.
Shortly after they start out, they meet series regular Doug the zombie. Doug has lost something that's left him quite perturbed. Luke is skeptical, Cleo is sympathetic, and Resus makes puns.
That Luke hasn't thought things through is obvious because the first house they go to belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Crudley, bog monsters. Even if they had wrapped candy on hand, would you trust it? There Luke finds out what Halloween means on Scream Street -- not to mention Valentine's Day. Luckily he doesn't have much time to feel crushed when loud screaming erupts from central square.
The screaming is over who is moving into house 26: the Headless Horseman. Women of various supernatural types are THRILLED. (By the way, there is a feminine form for 'ogre'. It's 'ogress'.) One of his fans faints as Eddie the Headless Horseman leaves his house on his huge black stallion. There's a full-page illustration, but one of Eddie's boots is conveniently placed to hide the stallion's unmentionables.
Luke, Cleo, and Resus discuss the Headless Horseman without once bringing up Washington Irving's classic story. Eddie's agent, a small gargoyle named Rocky, explains to our trio. Eddie himself is hawking his new product: a perfume named 'Decapitation Pour L'Homme' (Decapitation For Man). I loved the play on real life celebrity obsessions, especially the secret ingredient in the perfume.
One of the fans present is a small, shy female skeleton named Femur Ribs. She lives at number 27. She's so shy that this is the first time she's come out of one of her closets in years. Eddie was the reason. When his head is stolen, she's devastated.
The fifth relic Luke needs in order to get his parents back to the real world is the skull of the skeleton. Naturally, he figures that his archenemy, Sir Otto Sneer, landlord of Scream Street, has once again attempted to get a relic for himself. Luke, Cleo, and Resus sneak off to Sneer Hall. Sir Otto is up to something all right, but it's worse than they expected.
As usual, Sir Otto is verbally abusive to his dim-witted nephew, Dixon. That changes when Dixon's mother shows up. Queenie Sneer has taken back her maiden name because Dixon's shapeshifter father has done something for which I can't blame him, but Queenie does. She's Sir Otto's big sister and scarier than he is.
Queenie and Sir Otto's latest scheme are the two menaces of the book. Decide for yourself which is worse.
Notes:
Chapter 2: The Headless Horseman, Rocky, and Femur Ribs are introduced.
Chapter 3:
a. The Everwell Emporium sells a china plate commemorating a wedding of a couple whose names are puns on a famous fairy tale.
b. This is where we learn Femur's name and address.
Chapter 4:
a. Femur and Samuel Skipstone chat.
b. Sir Otto uses a line from a famous horror film.
Chapter 5:
a. We're introduced to Ottostein.
b. We learn about a company called Oddbods.
Chapter 6:
a. A Hex Hatch opens and we meet Queenie Sneer. She tells Dixon what his father has done.
b. Number 13, the Watsons' house, suffers a spot of damage.
Chapter 7:
a. While carrying out Luke's plan, we overhear Queenie's.
b. Resus makes a Harry potter joke.
Chapter 8: Queenie is making life difficult.
Chapter 9: We find out Eddie's previous job.
It's a great climactic battle. Queenie Sneer is a lot of fun to read about. There's a hint of romance and one about Luke that I've been expecting.
Wish I could afford to buy book six, let alone the whole series.
Samuel Skiptone assures Luke that his parents are all right, although the reason gives Luke fresh determination to get his normal parents back to the real world. Luke has two of the six founding father relics he needs to accomplish his goal. The next one is the heart of the mummy, of course.
We finally meet Cleo Farr the mummy's father, Niles, whose image has been on the double-page cast list since book one. We also learn what happened to Cleo's mother, Alexandria. Other introductions are to the Crudleys, a family of bog monsters, and Simon Howl, a ghost, who has just moved to Scream Street.
Our trio of relic hunters have a pretty hard time tracking down the mummy's heart. We can afford to chuckle, we're not there. I enjoye d the encounter with Founding Father Heru the mummy much more than they did.
Chapter 2:
a. Niles Farr is introduced.
b.. the Watsons have been on Scream Street for two weeks
c. Simon Howl is introduced. He's got the music of Buddy Bones (greatest skeleton jazz drummer in the world), playing.
d. Why the movers have no ears, eyes, noses, or mouths is explained. (Can the Movers get out of whatever contract or agreement they might have entered into? Their story is horrifying!)
Chapter 3:
a. Resus mentions his Uncle Sisor.
b. We learn how the Movers communicate.
c. Luke picks 'When the Saints Go Marching In' for his tune.
Chapter 5:
a. Heru isn't what they were expecting.
b. Ancient Egypt's most popular soap opera was 'The Nile Flows North'. One of the characters was Ramone, the telepathic cattleherder.
c. We meet Mrs. Crudley and her darling Fifi.
Chapter 6:
a. We meet Mr. Crudley.
b. Enter Doug the zombie.
c. Berry is a female zombie.
d. Sunday will be Turf's 38th re-birthday (the day he rose as a zombie).
e. Resus did pull an elderly relative's liver out of his cloak in an earlier book.
Chapter 7: The Farrs' nice surprise doesn't go well for Luke.
Chapter 8:
a. Things are getting darker at 13 Scream Street.
b. Mrs. Watson's first name is Susan.
Chapter 9:
a. There's a parade on Scream Street.
b. Resus invokes Dracula's name.
Chapter 10: Did Mrs. Watson's broken arm from book one get healed in only two weeks? If not, I hope it's covered in plastic.
Chaptr 11: Good news for some Scream Street residents, but what about the others?
Did I enjoy the third book? I certainly did! Well, aside from some disturbing implications that might not occur to younger readers. Arachnophobes might want to skip this one.
Scream Street vampires are kept supplied with blood from a special faucet in their kitchens. Suddenly, the supply is cut off. Luke, Resus, and their friend, Cleo Farr the mummy, are trying to get the blood running again in a good way while also searching for the second relic.
It's a given that Sir Otto and Dixon are Up to No Good, but an unintended side effect of Sir Otto's latest evil scheme will come to involve almost every resident of Scream Street, including the sewer rats. (Good thing it seems to have skipped the cleaning spiders. Just the thought of them being affected caused my tongue to stick out in revulsion.)
Notes:
Chapter 3: This is the first time Luke has seen Dixon shifting shape up close.
Chapter 5: Twinkle is introduced and described here.
Chapter 6:
a. Nelly Twist is introduced and described here.
b. We get Shan the black cat's origin story. How many lives he has now is mentioned.
This book's chase scenes are exciting and the attempt to retrieve the second relic very dangerous. As for the return dinner at the Watsons' house, I'm with Mr. Negative!
The illustrations by Lily Bernard are creepy and fun at the same time.
Cat fans should enjoy a black kitty named Shan.
Rat fans have even more to enjoy.
The book opens with a schoolboy named Steven Black being chased into a graveyard by a werewolf. The boy is not our hero. That's the werewolf, Luke Watson. Then an unlikely rescuer shows up.
By chapter two we learn the consequences of Luke's attack, which involve three blonds in purple jumpsuits. They're quite unnerving, but not nearly so much as when the Watsons wake up in their new home at number 13 Scream Street. Their next-door neighbors are a nice vampire family: Alston and Bella Negative, and their son, Resus. Resus is inclined to sneer at Luke until he finds out what Luke is.
Scream Street doesn't exist in our world. The sky seems to be permanently gray. It's supposed to be a place where monsters can safely live among other monsters. Sadly for Mr. and Mrs. Watson, they're normal humans. They're coping about as well as visitors to the Addams Family or the Munsters. (Well, to be fair, their home is attacked by a poltergeist even before their new landlord, Sir Otto Sneer, shows up in chapter five to penalize them for breaking a rule they knew nothing about. Yes, Sir Otto is THAT kind of jerk.)
Resus and Luke head for Everwell's Emporium to see if the local witch, Eefa Everwell, has finished that spell she's been working on to take care of poltergeists. On the way, they meet Doug, one of the three zombies who live at number 28. At the emporium itself we meet the she who will become the third member of a trio: Cleo Farr, a mummy. Luckily for Cleo (who is very brave, but completely lacking in good sense), Luke doesn't need a full moon to transform.
Luke really wants to get his parents back to the real world. His new teacher, Dr. Skully, owns the only copy of Skiptone's Tales of Scream Street, a book that's supposed to contain the secret of getting out of monster central.
The rest of the book involves our trio's efforts to find the book and follow its clues. They run into considerable danger along the way. It's handy that Resus' cloak stores plenty of useful objects and still hangs stylishly. (I want a cloak just like it!)
Because I'm an adult, I can think of solutions to some of our characters' problems, but they aren't very nice ones, so it's just as well that none of the characters have thought of them.
Notes:
Chapter 3:
a. We learn what the acronym 'G.H.O.U.L.' stands for.
b. Luke became a werewolf a year ago, on his birthday.
c. The outside of number 13 is briefly described.
Chapter 4: We meet Doug, Cleo, and Eefa.
Chapter 5:
a. We meet Sir Otto Sneer and his nephew, Dixon.
b. We first hear about Samuel Skipstone, who had a weird belief about the Loch Ness Monster.
c. We meet the teacher, Dr. Skully, his wife, Tibia, and their skeleton dog, Scapula.
d. We're told the titles of three of Dr. Skully's books besides the Skiptone one.
Chapter 6:
a. We get to see Sneer Hall and meet some hellhounds.
b. Doug mentions the title of the book he wrote.
Chapter 7:
a. There's a description of the library in Sneer Hall, which also has a conservatory.
b. Dixon seems to be singing 'The Hokey-Pokey'.
Chapter 8:
a. Resus demonstrates how useful his cloak is. (His joke makes sense if you know that a flashlight is called [an electric] torch in Britain. This is a British series.)
b. Samuel Skiptone hints that Sir Otto is Up To No Good. (What a surprise...)
Chapter 9:
a. Skiptone talks about the founding fathers of Scream Street.
b. Luke learns about the useful moss called 'gutweed'.
Chapter 10: We meet Squiffer and the Great Guff.
Chapter 11: We meet Resus' illustrious ancestor, Count Negatov.
Chapter 12: We learn why Sir Otto is such a jerk.
Mr. Smith admitted that he was older than the intended audience for Scream Street books and didn't expect adults to bother looking them up. He did highly recommended them for children who were old enough. I might be old enough to be 'The Dom's' grandmother, but I'm certainly glad I bothered. In fact, I've already requested the other three entries owned by my county libraries.
I couldn’t put it down and read it in one sitting. There were just so many funny moments. Out of the few Doctor Who books I’ve read, the Doctor always seems a little off to me, but in this book, to me at least, he seemed to be a lot like he was on the show.
The only reason I didn’t give this one five stars, was the fact that at times when the American characters were talking or thinking, they would say or think things that just didn’t seem right. At least I didn’t think they sounded right. I mean I don’t live in America, I live in Canada and I wasn’t alive in the 60’s so maybe I’m wrong. Like at one point Warren is backing up and it says that “He felt the back of his legs bump against something hard. The front bumper of the ambulance. He reached back to feel around on the vehicle’s bonnet with his fingertips, trying to work out which door he was closet to.” Bonnet? Am I wrong about this? Do some Americans say bonnet? Maybe I just read it all wrong. Maybe I’m completely clueless.
Overall it was a great read. However, I am now out of Doctor Who books. I must get more.
As you all might know, I am a big fan of Doctor Who. It is my favourite TV show, and I also like (most) of the books that have been written based on this show. I haven’t read a lot, only about six or seven, but I have never actually written a review about either one of them. So I decided to write a review about the one of the recent ones that I’ve finished. I might go and write reviews about my two all-time favourites (Touched by an Angel and the Stone Rose). Okay, I have given my opinion about this book a while ago, but this is a proper review. Oh, it might contain some minor spoilers.
Shroud of Sorrow is the first DW book that has Clara as companion. And since I loved Clara from the beginning, I needed to have this book. A couple of pages into the book, I already liked it so much, that I couldn’t wait to finish it, and to re-read it again. As the Doctor goes to change into dry clothes, he comes back into the main control room to find both Clara and the TARDIS crying. He then asks Clara if she called the TARDIS ‘fat’.
Later in the book, they end up on an ice-cold planet where the houses are built into the hill, like hobbit holes, Clara says. The Doctor and Mae then meet two clowns called ‘Flip Flop’ and (here it comes) ‘Wobblebottom’! I don’t like clowns at all, but I think I will like Wobblebottom when I meet him.
At the end of the story, it gets a bit sad, because the Doctor has to relive several of ‘sad’ moments in his life. Including saying goodbye to ‘his’ Ponds, in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’.
In total, I absolutely loved this story; I liked the plot, I liked the writing, and I just loved reading more about Clara, who is on her way of becoming one of my favourite companions (okay I love all of them, but Rose and Amy have a special place in my heart, and Clara is starting to get there too). I would recommend this book to everyone who has watched Doctor Who, and just anyone who loves to read a Sci-Fi story (though you probably would be a bit confused if you haven’t seen the show).
A great story for the younger reader. Funny and packed with adventure it should be a hit with all, but especially the boys.
First of all, there are spoilers for season 7, so I would not recommend reading it if you haven’t watched this season yet.
The story is ok. Not something amazing or as good as some other NSAs, but enjoyable. The best part is the characterisation. It’s spot on. The two main characters, the Doctor and Clara, are very in character, especially the Doctor, and you can almost hear him speaking. Also, the author writes the full of energy personality of this Doctor and how he can be so smart but sometimes so oblivious when it comes to humans very well. There’s a lot of very funny dialogue involving the Doctor, too. Some are so funny and random that I started laughing even though I wasn’t reading the book at home.
There’s one thing that I found a bit weird though. The one person that the Shroud (the current alien threat) impersonates for him is Astrid. I don’t really understand why of all the people in the Doctor’s lives, the Shroud would choose her. I guess that it’s a nod to earlier seasons and Doctors, as she appears in one of the 10th Doctor’s Christmas specials, but it’s an odd choice as all the other characters are seeing people who meant more to them than Astrid meant for the Doctor. I think River or Adric would have been better choices.
That said, I loved the many reference to past episodes, both classic and new. I’m sure that I missed some of them because I still haven’t watched all the classic episodes. Except for Astrid, they all worked well and didn’t seem forced.
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En primer lugar decir que hay spoilers de la temporada 7, así que yo no recomendaría a quien no la haya visto todavía.
La historia está bien. No es nada increíble ni tan buena como otras NSAs, pero es entretenida. La mejor parte es la caracterización. Es perfecta. Los dos personajes principales, el Doctor y Clara, están muy bien caracterizados, especialmente el Doctor, y casi puedes oírlos hablar. El autor describe muy bien la personalidad tan energética del Doctor y cómo puede ser tan listo y al mismo tiempo no darse cuenta de cosas cuando se trata de humanos. Hay diálogos divertidísimos que hicieron que me partiera de risa aunque no estuviera leyendo la novela en casa.
Hay algo que me pareció un poco raro. La persona que los aliens le enseñan al Doctor es Astrid. No termino de entender por qué de todas las personas en las vidas del Doctor la eligieron a ella. Supongo que es para meter algo de temporadas y Doctores anteriores, ya que aparece en uno de los especiales de Navidad del décimo Doctor, pero es una elección un poco rara porque a los demás se les aparecen personas que fueron más importantes en sus vidas de lo que Astrid fue para el Doctor. Creo que hubiera sido mejor que se tratase de River o Adric.
Dicho esto, me gustó mucho que hubiera guiños a episodios pasados, tanto de la serie clásica como de la nueva. Seguro que no los pillé todos ya que no he visto todos los episodios de la serie clásica. Excepto Astrid, todos los demás funcionaron muy bien y no me parecieron forzados.
This is the third of the three Eleventh Doctor novels published this year, and the first one to feature Clara - it may at this rate turn out to be the only Eleven/Clara novel, depending on the BBC's publication plans for the rest of the year. It's not the only story to be set on 23 November 1963, but it's also not the worst, using the backdrop of Kennedy's death for an alien being that feeds off sorrow, with some nice descriptive moments and considerable continuity service. It will set the scene nicely for younger readers wanting to sense the history of the show in advance of next month's celebrations.
Luke and his two friends set out on a quest to regain all the original artefacts of the towns founders. In the first book they much find a fang of the original vampire, the second a vial of the witches blood and in the third the heart of the mummy who founded the town. They are guided by an author who trapped himself in his own book and are chased at every step in their journey by evil landlord Otto Sneer.
These are a fun read and can be enjoyed by older readers too. The illustrations are great and it have just the right amount of bite in them. It looks like another great children's Liverpool (go scousers!) writer is on the scene.
Luke and his two friends set out on a quest to regain all the original artefacts of the towns founders. In the first book they much find a fang of the original vampire, the second a vial of the witches blood and in the third the heart of the mummy who founded the town. They are guided by an author who trapped himself in his own book and are chased at every step in their journey by evil landlord Otto Sneer.
These are a fun read and can be enjoyed by older readers too. The illustrations are great and it have just the right amount of bite in them. It looks like another great children's Liverpool (go scousers!) writer is on the scene.
Luke and his two friends set out on a quest to regain all the original artefacts of the towns founders. In the first book they much find a fang of the original vampire, the second a vial of the witches blood and in the third the heart of the mummy who founded the town. They are guided by an author who trapped himself in his own book and are chased at every step in their journey by evil landlord Otto Sneer.
These are a fun read and can be enjoyed by older readers too. The illustrations are great and it have just the right amount of bite in them. It looks like another great children's Liverpool (go scousers!) writer is on the scene.
It combined all the elements from my favourite novels for young readers - there were vampires (I love Darren Shan!), there were goblins (I love Artemis Fowl!), there was a talking book, and there was a feisty mummy. I'm sure as the novels progress the other characters mentioned will play a leading role - for example, I'd like to know more about the beautiful witch Eefa Everwell. Will the teacher play another role as well? Scream Street is relatively well written, with sentence structure that won't bamboozle a young reader. It's straightforward and fast paced. Had it been pitched at an audience of a few years older, then Donbavand could easily have expanded the description and slowed the pace down. The print size is good, it doesn't look babyish and I know children of 11 and over who will enjoy this - in fact I'm going to let some have a read of it!
I read the preview chapter of the next novel and what I liked was that it summed up how Luke and Resus (his friend) had met but opened straight into the exciting plot, bringing in Resus' parents and Luke's parents. Making the next novel sound very promising on their second quest, a quest I feel sure will involve Eefa Everwell.
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