Wishing Well

A Doctor Who novel featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha, in which our heroes wander into a tiny English village looking for a spot of tea and end up having to deal with an alien monster that lives under the town's historic wishing well.

This one was... okay. The first hundred pages or so, honestly, were pretty dull. Way too many of them seemed to consist largely of people standing around talking about how great this well is and what a wonderful tourist attraction it's going to make, and, come on, guys. It's a well. Minus the monster, it's really just not that interesting. And there's a lot of focus on the guest characters, who also aren't quite as interesting as the author thinks they are, either, but who are, y'know. Okay.

We do get a show more decent bit of mild creepiness, though, when the Doctor finally gets himself down that well (which you know he's going to). And the confrontations with the monster towards the end have some fun or slightly dramatic moments, in ways that do feel much like an episode of the show, only maybe with better special effects on the page than we might have gotten on screen.

Still, none of it is particularly memorable or anything. If it was an episode of the show, I suspect it wouldn't be one I'd bother re-watching much, although it wouldn't be one I'd go off and complain about on the internet, either. show less

Ten and Martha are in the picturesque English village of Creighton Mere in quest of a cream tea with scones and jam and clotted cream. They don’t find a tea room, but they do find a classic wishing well… one that is inhabited by a monster!

This was a pretty good story. The scary bits were properly scary, which I liked — good “YEARGH!” value. The writing was OK but nothing special. I’d still recommend this novel if you like Ten and Martha, though.

The Doctor and Martha come across a village with an old wishing well, but instead of being a curiosity for tourists, the well hosts a terrifying monster. This is one of the better Who-books I've read because the story is very easy to visualize being a regular episode and both the Doctor and Martha sound like the characters they are on the show. Its a very quick and entertaining read for Whovians, but I wouldn't really recommend this to someone who hasn't already seen the show - books like these are mainly advanced fan-fiction after all.

It's essentially Fury from the Deep rewritten for an English village setting but it continues the 2007 trend of the Who books rediscovering how to entertain. You probably won't remember much about it after a couple of days but it's an entertaining waste of an hour or so.

A Doctor Who novel featuring the Doctor in his Tenth incarnation with Martha Jones. This book is set in a very stereotypical English village somewhere in Derbyshire which comes complete with manor, lord of said manor, one village pub, a village green with the well of the title, and a treasure hunt thrown in for good measure.

Although the baddie in this book is a new one - an alien weed called a Vurosis which is determined to take over the whole planet as usual - the story itself is pretty much run of the mill. The village seems to be very much of a type only seen in 70s television programmes and so there's also some similarity to classic Who shows as well. There's certainly some heavy duty reminiscing going on. The book was very similar show more in style to The Sting of the Zygons, which was also written by Trevor Baxendale and also harks back to classic Who.

The characters are decent enough and the book is certainly readable. However, apart from a few creepy moments, it's rather generic and there's nothing much in it to make it stand out from the rest. show less

I listened to the audiobook of Wishing Well, which did not work for me at all. The plot of the story was standard fare for a Doctor Who episode, so I didn’t have any issues with it. However, the narrator of the audiobook was a woman, and hearing her speak the voice of David Tennant’s Doctor just seemed wrong.

I won’t be listening to any more of the Doctor Who books in the audio format in the future, because I’m too attached to how the characters sound in the TV show. I will give them another chance in book form though someday.

As for a rating, it is difficult to give one for the story because the whole experience was colored by my dislike of the narrator’s voice, so I’m giving it a middle of the road “3.”

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A nicely constructed novel of the Tenth Doctor and Martha, taking them to a contemporary English village where there is Something Narsty in the well. A good set of local characters filling out a fairly standard alien menace story; I wasn't completely convinced by the engineering aspects of the secret tunnel, but prepared to forgive it for overall charm