As someone brought up on Target's 128-page DOCTOR WHO novelisations, CHOSEN isn't so much a novelisation, more a doorstop. Unfortunately, after reading it, I was pretty much convinced that's all it's good for.

After having criticised some WHO books for a high price and low page count, CHOSEN can't be faulted on that score - a whopping 668 pages for a penny short of seven quid. But quality and quantity aren't the same thing, as CHOSEN clearly shows.

Unlike previous BUFFY novelisations, this isn't just three episodes based around a particular character, but the whole of season 7. Well, the bits relating to The First story arc anyway.

Season 7 is the only BUFFY season that this structure would work for, but even so, it's not without its fault. Clearly 22 episodes into 668 pages only allows for around thirty pages per 45-minute episode, so brevity is the order of the day.

The earlier episodes are afforded a lot less space than the later ones, with the first half of the book covering the first fourteen episodes. Some of the earlier episodes are skimmed over in around fifteen pages, but by the time we get to the end of the season, this has been steadily increased to just over fifty.

CHOSEN is not a particularly well-written novelisation. Its one episode per chapter structure means that the pacing isn't the greatest, despite the longer chapters towards the end as the action hots up.

It also appears that episodes have been novelised without too much regard to the overall book. For example, there are numerous references to the number of cemetaries in Sunnydale, when any decent writer would only need to have mentioned it once.

In fact not for the first time, I'm left wondering why Pocket Books employed Nancy Holder (although she isn't credited anywhere on my copy). Her habit of writing narrative in the same style as the Scooby Gang speak has always got on my nerves, and her overall style doesn't help matters either.

However, what really lets CHOSEN down is the shoddiness with which Pocket Books have put it together. The blurb at the front informs us that it's been written from the shooting scripts, but I suspect this was more from their desire to get the book on the shelves as soon after season 7 finished in the States than because they actually wanted to include material that was cut from the televised episodes. (And if they really did what to do that, why not simply release decent annotated script books?)

This haste means that the book is riddled with a completely unacceptable amount of spelling and grammatical errors. One or two is understandable, but eventually the sheer number becomes frustrating as the reader struggles through misspelt names and words and absent punctuation.

The complete lack of attention paid is demonstrated by the absence of a "Part One" title (we simply launch straight into Chapter One) and the fact that "End of Days" is the title of two consecutive chapters (the first is actually TOUCHED) - both obvious mistakes that would be difficult to miss (although the ones littering the text are the more annoying).