summerfalls-263x350By Amelia Williams

BBC ebook, out now

The Lord of Winter is coming – and only young Kate and a mysterious Curator stand in his way…

The story that Clara’s charge was reading in The Bells of Saint John was a nice little nod to the past, in the same way that one of the adults reading Metropolitan magazine or an article by Sarah Jane Smith might have been. It was a story by Amelia Williams – or Amy Pond as the rest of us know her – and we were warned that you might shed a tear or two in chapter 11.

Stand up, James Goss, who is responsible – and credited properly in the book, it must be stressed – for giving us the story, with, as forewarned, a tear-jerking moment in the eleventh chapter. It’s the sort of tale you can imagine Amy telling – its contemporary setting (the 1950s) has overlays of Amy’s “past” life in the twenty-first century, so there are phones where no-one in the 1950s would expect to find them, for example. She doesn’t name the Doctor – she’s learned her lesson from her final adventure with him – but it’s undeniably Matt Smith’s Time Lord who is there to help Kate when she needs it.

There are some neat twists within this short novella, and some aspects of it that don’t fit within what we know of the Doctor… so far, anyway – in particular the abilities of his feline friend. What it tells us about what’s coming up is harder to tell; these things are always much easier with 20/20 hindsight.

Verdict: Let’s have some more of these tales from the Pond pen! 7/10

Paul Simpson

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