The Scarlet Empress [Paperback]

It's a very complicated book, with many jumps in the narrative from different viewpoints, sometimes several within the same page. This can be a little difficult at times, but it's very rewarding overall. The perspectives from different characters and cultures are very rich and detailed, and all of them are treated with a good degree of respect.

There are one or two weak points. At some places, the plot almost disappears and these sections tend to drag a bit. There are other spots where the suspension of disbelief that was required was just a more than what I was willing to give. I can forgive one or two little coincidences, but there are some in here that are just so great that I felt they hurt the overall quality of the book.

On the whole, this is one of the best EDAs that I have read and is well worth a second read.

I don't have a problem with magic realism; in fact, I absolutely adore _The Blue Angel_, Magrs' second book with Jeremy Hoad. However, this one just doesn't work. The reason why is simple; Magrs is so busy coming up with neat little ways to describe things that he forgot to include a coherent plot in the novel.

The plot loosely revolves around a quest. The Doctor and Sam meet up with a figure from the Doctor's past named Iris, a batty Time Lady who looks a little like the town librarian and seems to be quietly appropriating the Doctor's past adventures for herself. Along the way, they meet up with four terminally uninteresting characters and ramble around in a haphazard manner, fiddling around with various denziens of the planet Prospero and generally being useless. Things culminate in a showdown which completely removes any credibility from the quest. The characters wander off in seperate directions and the reader is left with the shell-shocked feeling that the author is screaming about his cleverness into the reader's ear with a megaphone.

Paul Magrs needs a co-writer to be effective; in _The Blue Angel_, various ideas are tossed at the reader all at once, only to be stitched into a coherent picture by the end. The overwhelming feeling left at the end of _The Scarlet Empress_ is, "Um, is that it?"