Title: Doctor Who: Time Lord Fairy Tales
Author: Justin Richards, David Wardle (illustrator)
Genre: Sci-fi/fairy tale retelling
Date Read: 29/12/2015 – 03/01/2016
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
Everyone knows I’m a big Doctor Who fan. I’ve even visited the TARDIS and it was maybe one of the best days of my life (click here for pictorial evidence). And you only have to scroll through my reviews to see how much I enjoy fairy tale re-tellings. Even so, I was a little bit apprehensive about this book. I didn’t finish Tales of Trenzalore, and the Doctor Who novels do tend to be a bit hit-or-miss. This book was wonderful, though.
I’m going to assume that all of the stories in here are based on existing fairy tales, though I didn’t recognise all of them. Some stand-out ones included a Beauty and the Beast variation in which the Twelfth Doctor assists to reverse the effects of a time-loop-genetics-DNA screw-up, and another of The Pied Piper of Hamlin, in which the Second Doctor helps the crew of a space station to defeat an infestation of Cybermats. Not all the stories mention the Doctor, though they all star alien races from the series that we all know and love.
In all the stories, the writing was in that kind of quaint fairy-tale style that you expect from bedtime stories, but the sci-fi features were woven seamlessly into the writing. I could completely imagine some stuffy Time Lord official sitting by his child’s bedside in the Capital, telling him any one of these stories.
Now all that remains is for someone to write the fanfiction where a Gallifreyan child recognises the Doctor as one of the characters, and then the Doctor realises that he is indeed the character he so loved in his own childhood. Because that would be adorable.
A Keyboard and an Open Mind 
