Books like After Image

1.5 stars.If this wasn’t a BtVS book I would have DNF’d it at the half way point…maybe earlier. This story was about some force putting various people in Sunnydale asleep…well whatever force was at work in the book was making its way out of the book and putting me to sleep too. Normally I can bust through a 250-300 pg Buffy novel in about 3 to 4 hours. As I was reading After Image I could only read about 20 pages at a time before I had to set the book aside. There were some pros but the pace of this and the lack of anything going on just made those pros not matter. Takes place in Season 2 sometime after ‘What’s My Line’ but before ‘Surprise’.Let’s start off with the Pros!--There were no major continuity issues that I noticed. This takes place between WML and Surprise and other than that the time line is vague. In a lot of Buffy books the author makes the mistake of pinpointing exactly what episodes the book may fall between or on but they’ll mention stuff from future episodes that in the timeline they started out with it doesn’t make sense if you’ve watched the show. --(For example: Xander and Cordelia are still hiding their relationship or just got together which would be during the episode ‘What’s my Line’ but then the narrative will mention Angelus and Buffy being possessed by ghosts in ‘IOHEFY’ so by that point Xander and Cordy would have been exposed by then.) --The different perspectives. There wasn’t a lot of Buffy in this Buffy novel. It was mostly a Xander outing with a decent chunk of Cordy and a smattering of Buffy, Angel, Willow, Jonathan and Giles. Xander is usually my least favorite of our core team but I appreciated getting a story that was more centered around his character.And now the cons….-Nothing/very little happened for soooo long. All we got for about 150 pages was some slightly weird interactions or visuals of people and 1 creature. (view spoiler)[Cordy saw a cheerleader in weird clothing and then when she went to confront her she vanished (or at least seemed to vanish), some guy at the Bronze was dancing with Aura and then disappeared, there was a “new” nurse that Giles met but when Buffy looked into the old nurse was still there and had no idea about what was going on, a strange, yet charming older guy visited the Magic Box, and Buffy and Angel fought a weird Anubis looking like creature. (hide spoiler)]