Review: Bernice Summerfield: Missing Adventures edited by Rebecca Levene

Two days in a row of USF reviews! Check out my account of The Avengers: Steed and Mrs Peel: The Comic Strip Adaptations, Volume One.

Hardcover, 246 pages
Published 2007

Acquired June 2013
Read November 2015

Bernice Summerfield XI: Missing Adventures
edited by Rebecca Levene

After Genius Loci and the general quality of Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield anthologies, I really wanted to like Missing Adventures. Unfortunately, I found most of the stories somewhere between frustrating and pedestrian. These stories range across Benny's early life, from her childhood in boarding school up to the day before she met the Doctor in Love and War. I wanted a sense of Benny's development as a person, but I didn't really get that-- in most of these stories, she's just kind of generic goofy action Benny, not the well-rounded character she is when at her best. Unfortunately, given Genius Loci, Ben Aaronovitch's "The Evacuation of Bernice Summerfield Considered as a Short Film by Terry Gillam" is one of the most inexplicable of the lot. Beyond that, I don't really have strong impressions of anything here, except for the last story, Eddie Robson's "Thirty Love," a cute story about Benny's 30th birthday that brings back a lot of characters and concepts from Benny's original introduction in Love and War.

Next Week: One last prequel book before I dive into The New Adventures proper-- the Doctor meets up with the Daleks for the final time in Remembrance of the Daleks!