This book is a novel based on the television series "Gotham", which is a re-interpretation of Batman's childhood. This novel doesn't tell the story of Bruce Wayne as it's a prequel to the series, so the book ends where the first episode of season one begins.

I am a huge fan of the series so was delighted when I found this book in my local library, but the delight was short lived.

The good:

This reminds you of past events of you haven't watched the show in a long time. It has some brief mentions of some characters (e.g. Jerome, Cobblepot, etc.) that you wouldn't expect to encounter.

The bad:

The story was boring and predictable. If you have watched Gotham then you already know almost everything that's going to happen, anything you don't know is just filler and is not important.

Every female character was written in the same way - great body, really sexy, delicious hips, etc. and with a completely crazy personality, so there was no variation between the "slutty" news reporter, Harvey Bullock's partner, Fish Mooney, or Martha Wayne.

The editing was terrible. Some sentences made no sense whatsoever, the grammar was sloppy at parts (confusing who and whom, ending sentences in a preposition, etc.).

Some of the characters don't keep to their characters, and there are other inconsistencies. For example, Bruce Wayne was very well written throughout the book only to then comment on how he thought the movie was "kinda lame" at the very end. This is not the way he speaks. He is very well spoken and eloquent for the first 99% of the book, there is no other occurrence of him speaking like this and no reason for him to do so. Leslie Thomkins is mentioned in the book briefly and is called a psychiatrist, in the series she works in Arkham Asylum but she is a medical doctor in the female ward, not any sort of therapist. In the series all of the mobile phones are old chunky phones as it is set in the mid-90's or so (a year is never specified), in the novel people use smart phones despite it being set before the series.

I give this book 2/5 stars as I didn't give up on it, but I would not recommend it to anyone. If you're a fan of the show you are not missing anything by not reading this. ( )