Toy Soldiers (Doctor Who the New Adventures)

by Paul Leonard

Book Overview

The Doctor and Benny are following a trail o f kidnapped children across Europe, a continent recovering f rom the ravages of the First World War. The only clue they f ind is the toy bear each missing... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0426204522
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Virgin Pub
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.3" x 0.8" x 4.3"

Customer Reviews

The March of the Wooden Soliders

TOY SOLDIERS, to be brief, is a collection of some absolutely brilliant set pieces tied together in a plot that is merely adequate. Paul Leonard definitely knows how to write a good sentence. He has a great ability to construct an emotional and heart-tugging scene. He even creates some extremely worthy characters. But the talent to put all those excellent pieces together in a coherent story is something that has at times escaped him during the course of his writing career. Fortunately, in this instance, it isn't enough to derail the project. The finished product is a little bit less than the sum of its parts, but I'm not going to complain too much when the author uses such quality parts.In post-WWI Europe, most of the young men are dead. But something is happening to those that are left; children are being kidnapped, and the only clue is that each child was given a teddy bear by a mysterious stranger shortly before vanishing. The Doctor, Benny, Chris and Roz are, of course, investigating the disappearances. Chris and Roz stay in Europe looking for the responsible parties. The Doctor and Benny soon find themselves trapped on a planet called Q'ell, where the children are being forced to fight and die alongside aliens in a war that seems to serve no purpose.The regular characters are extremely well portrayed here. They all have their place and their function, but there is room enough for the characters to move around. Roz and Chris pair off each other entertainingly within the larger group, while the Seventh Doctor and Benny remain practically writer-proof. Leonard is the first author since Andy Lane in ORIGINAL SIN to make effective use of the two Adjudicators, and it's great to see them back on form.I particularly liked how, in the beginning, we see the TARDIS crew exclusively from the standpoint of the secondary characters that they encounter. We are allowed to view them as strange, different people who radiate an aura of power. This is the sort of thing that Andrew Cartmel liked to do in his novels, but he usually made the Doctor seem like a force of nature, something to be in awe of. Here, there is a sense of that, but they feel more like guardian angels, albeit ones dressed in unfamiliar clothes and speaking of strange anachronistic things.The discussions on war, killing, death and hate are, for the most part, quite interesting. Unfortunately, there are one or two places where Leonard crosses the line between subtle hinting, and sledgehammer moralizing. I really appreciated the sequence where Roz unknowingly mimicked a 20th century xenophobic woman. I didn't like it so much when the author pointed out how clever the comparison was. Still, the understated portions outweigh the heavy-handedness, so the batting average on this count is fairly good even if there are a few obvious missteps.During the beginning of this book, the imagery and situations that Leonard was throwing at me gave me goose bumps while reading. Towards the