Chosen

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Buffy book reviews)

Chosen

By Nancy Holder (2003)

RATING: 2/5 Stakes

SETTING: Seventh Season

CAST APPEARANCES: Buffy, Giles, Willow, Xander, Anya, Dawn, Andrew, Jonathan, Kennedy, Faith, Spike, Angel, Robin Wood, The First, Amy, Caleb, Hallie, D’Hoffryn, Quentin Travers, Molly, Rona, Annabelle, Chloe, Vi, Chao Ahn, Amanda, Kelly, Shannon, Colleen, Dianne, Caridad, Isabella.

BACK OF THE BOOK SUMMARY “The First has come to Sunnydale and set its sights on taking down the Slayer. On the side of the White Hats: Buffy, Xander, Willow, Anya, Dawn, Giles, Spike, Faith, Angel, and an assortment of young, innocent, untried Potentials. In this season-spanning storyline, Buffy Summers will learn about the primeval origins of her own strength, and have the opportunity to train those who would succeed her. And as the forces of evil find their way back to the Hellmouth—where it all began—the Slayer will uncover what being the Chosen One is all about: Power.”

REVIEW

Unique among Buffy novelizations, Chosen doesn’t simply present one or two episodes in book form; instead, it novelizes the entire seventh season in a thick, 700-page tome. Buffy’s seventh and last season was certainly a grim one, but also included some of the show’s best writing. Many of those great scenes—Xander telling Dawn that she’s not special, she’s extraordinary; Anya and Andrew having a wheelchair fight; Buffy, Willow, and Dawn facing their demons in “Conversations with Dead People”—are included in Chosen, and it’s impossible to read the novelization without feeling the same emotions elicited by the episodes themselves.

To a large degree, however, that’s the purpose and effect of any decent novelization—to embody, in a different format, what made the original episodes great. Although Chosen is satisfactory in this sense, it fails in others. Most glaring (and annoying) is the incredibly poor proofreading, literally the worst I’ve ever seen from a mainstream press. Words are frequently misspelled, grammar is massacred, and some idiot used the computer’s “Find and Replace” function improperly, resulting in every single instance of “potential” capitalized as “Potential” and every “the first” capitalized as “The First.” Thus, Xander tells Spike that “I take The First shower in the morning” on page 98. Even a quote from one of the characters on the back cover of the book has a grammatical error. I understand Simon Pulse was in a hurry to release the book to coincide with the show’s final episode, but a final read through by an English graduate student would have made the book look far more professional. Fortunately, the unintentional humor created by these frequent errors helps replace much of the intended humor from the shooting scripts that was left out due to space considerations.

Holder, unlike the authors of other Buffy novelizations, takes more freedom with the scripts, often giving us her interpretation of what the characters are thinking or what certain dialogue means. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this—novelizations don’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) word-for-word recreations of the script; but it can be jarring to Buffy fans who made different interpretations of what certain scenes in episodes meant. For example, the very last scene of the very last episode of season seven depicts Buffy staring out over the crater that used to be Sunnydale, with an enigmatic smile on her face. Holder’s interpretation of this scene is that Buffy is thinking of the “cookie-dough” metaphor she gave to Angel earlier. Not necessarily the wrong interpretation, but perhaps different than how other fans (including myself) interpreted the scene. To some degree, it takes the fun away when mysteries like this are “solved” by the writers of novelizations.

Overall, Chosen is the worst of the Buffy novelizations I’ve read so far. It competently recreates the episodes like any minimally-acceptable novelization, but is otherwise an error-strewn mess. It should be purchased only if you’ve never seen season 7 episodes and can’t wait for the DVD, or if you were foolish enough not to record them and want to reexperience certain key moments.