I believe that I must have adored the Find Your Fate books when I was much younger. Certainly, the copies I currently own (retained from my youth) bare the markings of extreme use. In our day, after trudging three or four miles back and forth to school, we youngsters didn't have fangled, complicated video games to take our minds off of gruel and dirt, so we had to resort to the Find Your Own Adventure Books in order to satisfy our desires to interact with fiction. Okay, so much of that previous sentence is a lie, but many of these books actually were a lot of fun to an eight-year-old.

Sadly, INVASION OF THE ORMAZOIDS isn't the best Doctor Who Find Your Fate Adventure available. Philip Martin doesn't seem particularly suited to the second-person narration aspect of these books, and a lot of the book seems very contrived. The protagonist of the novel, the ubiquitous "you" is (according to the illustrations) a fairly androgynous looking, person, who upon meeting the Doctor immediately forgets his or her name and swipes a moniker from the TARDIS control panel. The two of you (mostly you) wander around in the twenty-fifth century at the edge of the universe trying to seize control of the Master Genetic Code Signifier. The Master Genetic Code Signifier is a device that, when properly used, allows the user to create perfectly synchronized ballroom dancers. In the wrong hands, this could lead to galactic domination. Or something. An evil guy called Darval is looking for a good galactic domination weapon and has designs on the aforementioned Master Generic Code Signifier. You have to stop him and the only way you can prevent the dastardly plan from coming to fruition is to blast things with lasers.

The book isn't terribly appealing from a Doctor Who standpoint. Most paths that you can take end up with you separated from the Doctor and forced in to a fairly standard action adventure. It's not overly interesting and most of the time it doesn't really feel like a Doctor Who adventure. I'd recommend some of the other FYF books, in which you actually get to interact with the Doctor and his companions.

(A warning. K9 appears on the cover but isn't in the actual text of the book, so try not to be too heartbroken when the little fellow doesn't appear.)

How Philip Young earned the respect of his colleages is a mystery to me. So is his reasoning in "Hawthorne's Secret: An Untold Tale." Cleary without any kind of grasp on Hawthorne's life or work, Young took scraps of "evidence" and then drew an unlikely conclusion, calling it Hawthorne's "secret." It's unfortunate that trees had to die for this bit of speculation.

I have just finished reading this book. There seems to be a lot of information little heard of before. This would be beneficial except the author's writing is confusing. He writes of Elizabeth Loring, Frances Wentworth, Peggy Shippen, Margaret Moncreife, et al. (and the men in their lives). Yet they are interspersed throughout the book. The chronology is not consistent, and one becomes confused as to which person the author is writing about. The author intermixes actual facts (?) with book reviews which creates further confusion to one not well versed in the subject. The book appears to be a collection of essays thrown together.