There's something of an identity crisis about the latest Pocket Books Buffy novelisation.  The cover claims it's based on Faith, Hope & Trick, Enemies, Bad Girls and Consequences, but Enemies is actually absent from the title page inside the book - although there's no actual mention of Revelations, which is actually included!

The Pocket Books novelisations have come in for a fair amount of stick on this website, for merely serving up functional retreads of the televised episodes, and making little or no attempt to go beyond this.

Of course, with three episodes to cram in, there's not exactly a lot of space for that, but it's nice to see James Laurence making an attempt here, despite having to fit in four episodes.

From her arrival in Sunnydale, Faith has always been a bit of a loner, and there's a definite sense of that here.  While Buffy had the Scooby Gang and Joyce to fall back on, Faith had no such support mechanism, despite her occasional attempts at building bridges.  It's hardly any wonder, then, that she went off the rails.  For those of us who are fans of the character, the author also manages to stay on the right side of the thin line between Faith's attitude to guys and turning her into an out-and-out slut (Nancy Holder, take note).

Apart from giving us a sense of Faith's isolation, the author also hints at Willow's envy that Faith has more in common with Buffy than she does.  The novel also scores by not going in for the first person linking material that we get in the likes of the Willow Files.

Of course, it's not perfect.  A couple of years on, season three's few faults are a little more obvious - Willow's little sayings and Buffy's all too obvious malapropisms prove more annoying now than they used to, and even though he was supposed to be annoying, Wesley is just a little too stereotypical to be believable.  The fact that we're not consecutive episodes also means that there has to be some filling-in of events, such as Faith and Xander's encounter in The Zeppo.

However, none of those faults can be blamed on the author, who makes a decent attempt to novelise the televised episodes, as well as delving a little deeper into the characters here and there.  One of the better Pocket Books novelisations.

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