Believe I read this novel during the latter part of 2002.

Thinking back 13 years, I recall Buffy's "present" soul being transported and trapped into her future self when she's in a world turned sour. It was like a tragedy on some ways during the scenes set in the future, but the reader knows Buffy will find a way to return to the present and sort out all the problems, and finding out how she does so is the interesting part.

I was engaged rather than enthralled by this, but it certainly was worth reading. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2513777.html

Set in early Season Four (Xander and Anya are together, so are Oz and Willow), this has Buffy yanked forward to an alternative future in which Giles has been turned vampire by the ancient demon Camazotz (I'd always thought that was just the evil planet of A Wrinkle in Time, but it turns out that it's also the name of an Aztec god of bats). This gives Golden licence to kill off many characters both new and old, before returning Buffy to our time line where everything is almost as before. It's well enough written, with reflections on how the other characters would have developed in five years where they had continued the fight without Buffy.

I'm troubled, though, as I was in the other book I read by this author, that the story ends up on the wrong side of colonialism - Camazotz, who is after all a native American entity, is rapidly outsmarted by vampire Giles who takes charge of his realm and allows the indigenous inhabitants only as much licence as he finds amusing; and this is presented as a natural development. So I may cast my reading of Buffy a bit wider, but I think I will try other writers next. ( )

The first in a quadrilogy entitled "The Lost Slayer" begins like your average Buffy plot: new Big Bad shows up in town with freaky acolytes and tries to take on the Slayer. Giles even gets knocked out! But then, in the last chapter the story turns incredibly interesting. I won't spoil it for you, but it's incredibly tantalizing. And nearly impossible to have portrayed on the small screen. A big complaint I've had with several of the Buffy novels is that it's either a novelization of an actual episode with just a little extra thrown in (deleted scenes, if you will) or that it could've been an episode but didn't make the cut, for obvious reasons. But this, this is something different, and I'm very interested as to how it plays out. It's also gratifying that Golden writes these characters so well. You can almost hear the actors voicing the dialogue. ( )