Alex's Reviews > Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ghost Roads
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ghost Roads (The Gatekeeper Trilogy, #2)
by
by
This is the second book in a trilogy, and it really felt like things took a step down here.
The first book was almost self-contained, but with an open ending... This book however feels purely like a plate-spinning bridge between books one and (I assume) book three. Most of the book revolves around Buffy, Angel, and Oz travelling together... But (mild spoiler alert?) they don't really find anything until the last 50 pages of the book.
Meanwhile, in Sunnydale, nothing overly dramatic really seems to ramp up. They just keep trying to fight whatever monsters pop up... until the end, when things take a very dramatic turn, except it's a book based on a TV show, so of course the stakes are non-existent when it comes to someone being in mortal danger.
And then we have Spike and Drusilla, introduced at the end of the previous book as a twist villain... except they're not really the villains, they're just trying to basically scam the true villains. But they spend the whole book separate from the Scoobies, finally crossing paths at the end and then are basically dealt with in a really underwhelming way that uses exactly the same resolution as we saw in Becoming Part 2 (and having the characters reference to each other that they had this same arrangement in the past does't excuse the plot-recycling). It just feels like such a waste of two hugely dynamic characters, to shove them to the side and then discard them really lazily. I hope they're back in book 3 and somehow play a larger role...
One of my favourite things about the first book was that they threw in some character discourse about growing up, graduation, what The Future holds, etc... and that's basically all shoved to the side in this book, so I was a little disappointed in that.
That being said, the final 50 pages do ramp things up a bit, and set some interesting things in place for the final book. But I really think this could have worked either as an additional conclusion to book one, or just as an introduction to book three, because I don't feel there was enough plot here to make up a whole book.
The first book was almost self-contained, but with an open ending... This book however feels purely like a plate-spinning bridge between books one and (I assume) book three. Most of the book revolves around Buffy, Angel, and Oz travelling together... But (mild spoiler alert?) they don't really find anything until the last 50 pages of the book.
Meanwhile, in Sunnydale, nothing overly dramatic really seems to ramp up. They just keep trying to fight whatever monsters pop up... until the end, when things take a very dramatic turn, except it's a book based on a TV show, so of course the stakes are non-existent when it comes to someone being in mortal danger.
And then we have Spike and Drusilla, introduced at the end of the previous book as a twist villain... except they're not really the villains, they're just trying to basically scam the true villains. But they spend the whole book separate from the Scoobies, finally crossing paths at the end and then are basically dealt with in a really underwhelming way that uses exactly the same resolution as we saw in Becoming Part 2 (and having the characters reference to each other that they had this same arrangement in the past does't excuse the plot-recycling). It just feels like such a waste of two hugely dynamic characters, to shove them to the side and then discard them really lazily. I hope they're back in book 3 and somehow play a larger role...
One of my favourite things about the first book was that they threw in some character discourse about growing up, graduation, what The Future holds, etc... and that's basically all shoved to the side in this book, so I was a little disappointed in that.
That being said, the final 50 pages do ramp things up a bit, and set some interesting things in place for the final book. But I really think this could have worked either as an additional conclusion to book one, or just as an introduction to book three, because I don't feel there was enough plot here to make up a whole book.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
July 24, 2022
–
Started Reading
July 24, 2022
– Shelved
August 2, 2022
– Shelved as:
2022
August 2, 2022
–
Finished Reading