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City
Of Angels. Run by powerful forces, agents of pure evil.
It's a city hard on its human population. If Angel
wants to save
himself, he's going to have save them...somehow. With
the help of two unlikely allies - a half demon and an ex-May
Queen - he's going to have to set up shop.
And
keep watch over his city.
Just
like Buffy and Charmed before it the first novel
from Pocket Books is a straightforward novelization of the premiere
episode. After seeing only the teaser of the first episode,
the bit before the credits roll, I didn't know what to expect
from the novelization. And now after reading it I can
only hope that the episode itself is better.
Unlike
any other novelizations I have read, Holder not only uses City
of as source material, but also key scenes from Passion
and Becoming to help pad out the book. Admittedly
if you're still only getting your Buffy fix from BBC2,
and haven't bought the other three Angel Chronicles books,
then this is a good jumping on point. But if you bought
this to know what the first episode of Angel is like
having read all the other Buffy books and watching to
the end of season 3, you're in for a disappointing time, most
likely involving skipping half the "flashbacks" to
get to the new stuff. Despite being only 177 pages long,
about a third of this consists of Holder novelizing flashbacks,
making the dramatic ending seem rushed.
Whether
the premiere of Angel really doesn't involve enough storylines
to fill out a whole novel, not all the episode hade been filmed,
or deadlines were so short that Holder had to resort to previously
filmed episodes to fill out the novel, City of doesn't
really offer more than an hour, or two if you read the flashbacks,
of reading time.
Not
really up to the standard of the previous novelizations, but
then again The Harvest novelization of the first two
Buffy episodes was not really that good either...
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CITY
OF
Written by NANCY HOLDER
POCKET BOOKS
$4.99
RATING: 6/10
Reviewed by RICHARD MORGAN
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