redfiona99

To misuse a baseball term, this book struck out swinging.

It tried, very hard, to be a fun Torchwood book, in keeping with the show. And bits of it are excellent. Gwen and Rhys, Emma Webster, the Cheryl Cole style voice in her head, are all wonderfully drawn. They sounded real and believable. Jack and Ianto, not so much. Which is a problem when it's a book that focuses on Jack and Ianto.

In a large part, it's because I don't believe our Ianto Jones, Ianto - unflappable, repressing everything, never a hair out of place - Jones, would react like that if he suddenly woke up in someone else's body, never mind the gender of the person. Since his reaction is a large part of his story, it means it doesn't quite work.

The description of the horrible thing that lurks towards the end of the book is pleasingly ooky though.

So it's an honourable failure, but worth a read if you're a Torchwood fan.

There's a bit where Ianto describes Owen as a World of Warcraft player, and that didn't quite work. It's not that I can't imagine Owen playing WOW, it's more I can't imagine him letting anyone else know because WOW players rank somewhere lower than Old Skool Who fans on the cool hierarchy. That being said, if anyone who actually plays Warcraft wants to write the fic where Owen uses Warcraft to deal with the boredom of being not-dead, please do. It would be awesome.

Torchwood: SkyPoint by Phil Ford
Sting of the Zygons by Stephen Cole
Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale
Anything Goes by John Barrowman
Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler
I Am What I Am by John Barrowman
Inside the Hub: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Torchwood Series One by Stephen James Walker
Red Serpent: The Falsifier by Delson Armstrong
Primeval: Shadow of the Jaguar by Steven Savile
Investigating CSI: An Unauthorized Look Inside the Crime Labs of Las Vegas, Miami and New York by Donn Cortez

I've read one of the suggestions, and I'm sure I'll read at least one of the others eventually.