This wasn’t very good at all. In fact it was downright pedestrian. The story was unoriginal and lacked excitement and separated Rose and the Doctor from the very start which immediately removes one of the prime reasons for reading a Doctor Who novel in the first place. If i decide to read any more of these, i shall dispense with my initial plan to read them in order from beginning to end and simply cherry pick the best of them according to the ratings and reviews they get from around the intenet.

I’m sure(or at least hoping) there must be well-written, entertaining or thought provoking, must-read type Doctor Who novels out there somewhere.

Not great. The worst of the two i’ve read so far.

( )

It was surprisingly good Doctor Who story. The Raxacoricofallapatorians where interesting. The fight between two families was interesting and they even brought up what happened to the Slitheen at the 10 Downing street.

Rose's character was amazingly done. She was independent and clever. She managed well without the Doctor helping her and when she had to play being really smart, she caught on to Doctor's hints really well. It was her first time on an alien planet also.

The Doctor was written like the Doctor and he really cared about and worried about Rose.

It was tons better than the first 9th Doctor story. ( )

This book was really good with lots of twists and turns and surprise endings. I do prefer them in the BBC audio form, though. ( )

A while back, a friend of mine told me she had a couple of Doctor Who books she wasn't going to read anymore. When I was at her place, I took a couple of them with me, one of them being The Monsters Inside, but in Dutch ("De Verborgen Monsters"). It featured Rose Tyler and the Ninth Doctor, so I was really enthousiastic about it because Nine was my first Doctor, and Rose is one of my favourite companions.

The Monsters Inside tells the story of how Nine and Rose are being arrested for trespassing on a planet. They are each brought to a different prison, and they're trying their best to get back to each other. But then they find out that there are creatures trying to infiltrate the prison planets, and they must do their best to stop them.

I'm going to say it right away: I was disappointed. The first Doctor Who book that I didn't give a positive rating. And I am so sad about it, because I love both Nine and Rose; but I just couldn't care about this book. And the majority of it was the main villain of this story. Raxacoricofallapatorians. We met a couple of Slitheens in the first season of Doctor Who, and I already disliked them a lot then; but this book made me dislike them even more. I have no idea who even came up with these aliens who literally wear people's skins and then fart and burp because they're too fat to fit in the suits; really?!

It really made me dislike the book, and made me not want to finish it. Even though I wanted to find out how they were going to get back together again, and how they were going to defeat these creatures. But eventually, I just decided to give up, so I closed the book at page 230. I do plan on skimming through the rest of the book to find out what happens, but I'm not going to read the rest.

I loved Rose, I loved the Doctor; I also liked Flowers and Dennel, but other than that I couldn't feel anything for any of the characters, and I just didn't care whether they lived or died.

Then there was also the fact that it was written in Dutch. It is my native language, but it's certainly not my favourite language, especially not to read in. I've said it in probably every review of a Dutch book on my blog; but it's so childish. And - this is a little pet peeve of mine - every 'you' in the original book was translated into the formal you in Dutch (we have the informal 'jij/jou/jouw' and the formal 'u/uw') and I don't know but I find that a bit annoying. Sorry not sorry.

In the end, I didn't like The Monsters Inside which saddens me. I'll be picking up another Doctor Who book soon, another one I got from my friend, also written by Stephen Cole but this time it's in English. So yeah, I can't really recommend this book to people, unless you really want to read all the Doctor Who books out there.

My opinion on this book in one gif:

( )

This was pretty good. It got a bit too technical at some points, which made it slow (for me), but it wouldn't be Doctor who without it I guess. ( )