A review by sleepey
Doctor Who: Big Bang Generation by Gary Russell

1.0

Dreadful writing, exhaustingly overcooked plot, far too much time spent gushing over the guest characters while most of them contribute nothing at all to the story (beyond making Big Finish fans go "ooh I get that reference" every couple of pages).

There's a bit where the Doctor and his companion are spooked by a mysterious stranger who somehow knows the Doctor's name... after the Doctor introduced himself & told him his name not even a dozen lines up the page.

There's a extremely weird & uncomfortable romance subplot between an alien assassin lady & a gay teenage dog boy.

There's this passage, which took me several attempts to parse & made me genuinely wonder if this book had an editor:

She was small, about four feet tall, slumped in a stained and cigarette-burned green velvet armchair, a glass of fizzy water in her hand. The Doctor knew that because he knew that these days that was all Ker'a'Nol the Pakhar (Keri to her friends) drank.

And I know this is probably more a marketing thing than the author's fault, but "The Glamour" in this story has absolutely no relation or resemblance to "The Glamour" in the previous book, making the whole idea of the "Glamour Chronicles" trilogy feel very weak & misleading.

I can usually chomp through one of these novels in a session or two but this one was a huge slog from beginning to end. I hated it, & I would recommend skipping it (ie. throwing it in a skip)