LitPick Review
During Season Three of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, viewers were introduced to Faith, a bold Slayer who loved breaking the rules and testing the limits. A fan favorite, she appeared on the spin-off series Angel on multiple occasions, then came back to BtVS during its final season.
Faith was one of my favorite characters. She was memorably portrayed by actress Eliza Dushku. Many fans wished she had her own spin-off. Those who were loyal readers of the official BtVS/Angel original books also wished for a book that focused solely on Faith.
Opinion:
The book Go Ask Malice is supposed to be Faith's diary, chronicling the time of her callling, and found in the ruins of Sunnydale after the series finale. This means that, from the get-go, the reader is supposed to believe that Faith would 1) keep a diary; and 2) carry it around through multiple moves, from Boston to Sunnydale to Los Angeles, then prison, then out of prison, then back to Sunnydale. I tried to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story, but I couldn't.
I never stop reading a story once I've started it, but this was really hard to get through. Since it was a diary, it was written in first person, but it didn't sound like Faith's voice to me. I constantly wanted to correct it. It wasn't one hundred percent wrong.
Little tidbits were thrown at readers here and there - things and people Faith had said on the show in passing were made into plots and crucial characters - but overall, it never felt right.
For a better taste of Faith fiction, try the short story written by Christopher Golden and Thomas E. Sniegoski in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds: Prima's Official Strategy Guide. It is brief but powerful, and you'll be wishing Golden and Sniegoski wrote a full Faith novel instead.
