Several of my friends regularly watch/watched Dr Who and Torchwood. I managed to never get into Torchwood when it was on the air. I was familiar with the characters and concepts due to catching bits and pieces of the show or hearing friends discuss some point or other. I'm more of a reader than TV watcher, so I started reading this series as I was interested enough to see what it was all about. At first, I had assumed the novels would just retell the events from the TV show, but these are totally different stories. The books do occasionally touch on stuff that happened in the show as the events they portray sort of happen between episodes. After reading the first 12 novels in this series, I actually went back and watched the whole show, too, since I liked the characters so much. ( )

I did not like the writing style on this one. It's overly simple, and while I suppose that's some kind of joke, I just did not like it. However, the story is excellent. ( )

Very quick, fun read. Laugh-out-loud funny in a number of places. "The Perfection" are improving the Cardiff population, with some dangerous consequences. ( )

To misuse a baseball term, this book struck out swinging.

It tried, very hard, to be a fun Torchwood book, in keeping with the show. And bits of it are excellent. Gwen and Rhys, Emma Webster, the Cheryl Cole style voice in her head, are all wonderfully drawn. They sounded real and believable. Jack and Ianto, not so much. Which is a problem when it's a book that focuses on Jack and Ianto.

In a large part, it's because I don't believe our Ianto Jones, Ianto - unflappable, repressing everything, never a hair out of place - Jones, would react like that if he suddenly woke up in someone else's body, never mind the gender of the person. Since his reaction is a large part of his story, it means it doesn't quite work.

The description of the horrible thing that lurks towards the end of the book is pleasingly ooky though.

So it's an honourable failure, but worth a read if you're a Torchwood fan. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1903082.html

I may have mentioned once or twice that I think James Goss is one of the best writers of Who spinoff literature currently in business. Almost Perfect appears to have been his first book, a 2008. Torchwood novel set between Season 2 and Children of Earth, and while I liked it a lot it doesn't quite reach the level of his later work. There is a sexy alien presence, which is classic Torchwood, and Ianto gets transformed into a beautiful woman for most of the novel, which is very entertaining; and there is a lot of really good writing about the Gwen/Rhys relationship, and about how much Owen and Toshiko are missed. But the book slightly misses the mark with regard to Jack's characterisation and back-story, and the actual resolution seemed a bit incoherent - lots of fantastic imagery but lacking a decent frame. So, as Torchwood novels go, one of the decent ones; as James Goss novels go, it shows the way to future excellence. ( )