With Pocket Books themselves already publishing Buffy scripts, and with Fox releasing the series on video and DVD, Pocket Books' simple novelisations are surely becoming a little superfluous these days?  However, it looks like they're sticking with their tried and tested policy of novelising three episodes, apparently centring around a particular character, in just over 200 pages.

This time it's Willow who's the centre of attention, and following her earlier adaptation of I, Robot...You, Jane, Phases and Dead Man's Party, Yvonne Navarro returns with a second batch of episodes with a bias towards Miss Rosenberg.

Yet again, I'm left wondering about Pocket Books' choice of episodes - Gingerbread, Doppelgangland and Choices.  Wouldn't it have made more sense to have novelised The Wish and Doppelgangland together, possibly explaining how the alternate reality created and supposedly destroyed in the former came to exist as some kind of parallel universe.

Sadly, that's beyond the scope and, I daresay, the budget of these novelisations.  So we're left with the usual straightforward adaptations of the script, all with first-person linking material purporting to be from Willow.  As I said in my review of the first volume, this approach jars, as we move from the links to the third-person narrative of the episodes themselves.

The actual adaptations are fine, but nothing special.  Surely something could have been done to heighten the Scooby Gang's initial confusion in Doppelgangland, instead of references to "Vamp Willow" from the outset.  And the first-person approach I'd like to see could have been used to good effect during Willow's imprisonment in Choices.

Therefore, the closing comments that I seem to find myself using on almost every review of the Buffy novelisations apply yet again - this one's only really for Buffy completists.

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