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I wanted to like this book. Really, I did. I’m a huge, huge, HUGE fan of all things Joss Whedon/Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the idea of an alternate universe where Evil Willow was never stopped intrigued me. That is, until it was revealed just where the book turned away from the show and entered its own world. You see, I was hoping that it would start to diverge around the end of the season 6 conclusion. That Willow would be so far gone by the time the book began that we’d hardly recognize the familiar Sunnydale we were so used to seeing. Instead, it converged almost at the very beginning of the storyline, and I found this disappointing. The problem of course, is that if Evil Willow from the TV show wasn’t stopped, there wouldn’t be much of a story, because she would have succeeded in ending the world and...well, that would be that. The world would be over. I understand that there’s no story in that. Yet I find it unfair that this book is apparently about “what would happen if Evil Willow was never stopped” because that’s not what it’s about. It’s about an alternate universe Willow with a slightly different plan than TV Willow. As a Buffy story on its own, it only holds up somewhat decently. Navarro got the voice of most of the character down all right, save for Tara. I don’t know if becoming a ghost suddenly made her a very different person, but Ghost Tara and regular human Tara don’t seem to connect in anything other than name and appearance. Her ways of talking and general mannerisms just aren’t there, and I felt you could replace Tara with any other morally correct ghost and the story would be pretty much the same. The story is a bit below standard, though I’ve come to expect that from novels based around television programs. It’s not terrible, but the threat Willow poses never feels serious enough to base a book around. Overall, it could have been worse, but it also could have been a lot better.

quck at some points slow at others always, always keeps you guessing.descrpitive and quite captivating. the characters are also so well defined.