When I first started this book, I wondered how Beyer was going to thread three apparently disparate plot lines, and also tie them up acceptably within less than 250 pages. Not only did she manage to do it, she did it convincingly and all three stories felt important and were endlessly fascinating.
First, the character voice for Buffy was 100% on point. I have read plenty of Buffy tie-ins that were not, but not only was her dialogue with her friends and her family and with the villains exactly what it would be on the show, but her inner monologue was exactly what her personality should be. This story takes place somewhere around the time frame of 2x20 "Go Fish," but the most recent visual canon event that is mentioned outright is 2x19 "I Only Have Eyes for You." Buffy is struggling with the lesson of forgiveness that she learned from living through the story of James and Grace in this novel, and I love that Beyer makes it that Buffy (even at the book's end) still has not quite reached the point where she can understand Grace's readiness to forgive James. It's very realistic and Beyer does not beat us over the head with Buffy's self pity, but we can still see how her mental state at that point in season 2 is playing into all of her decisions.
Also, I felt bad for Principle Snyder...and that is a sentence I never thought I would say or type. We get a glimpse into his childhood here, and as the novel points out, "It takes a monster to make a monster," and the monster that Snyder could be on the show had to come from somewhere. I also love that, in typical Joss Whedon humor as would be present on the show, we are allowed a moment to feel for Snyder before also laughing at the comeuppance his present monstrous self often brings to himself.
Angelus, Drusilla, and Spike also get an interesting story here. We get quite a few pages of this book dedicated to their dynamic, and the story of the child-vamp Callie also helped solidify the Spike turning against Angelus plot thread that we got in Becoming Part 2. The only part of this whole deal that made me turn my head slightly in confusion was the conversation between Buffy and Spike in the final chapter before the epilogue. In Becoming Part 2, Buffy is genuinely confused when Spike comes to her for a team-up and they manage to hold a conversation without decking each other the whole time. Given that this novel happens only a couple of weeks before that, and Buffy and Spike have a perfectly civil conversation, that makes her confusion in Becoming Part 2 make less sense because it would not have been the first time that happened. It's a small little moment, but given that this story was penned in 2008 (5 years after the show ended), I find it hard to reconcile the obvious discrepancy.
Also, there is a sentence in the book where Spike thinks (in narrative) that Buffy had been on his list of annoyances to get rid of for over a year. This is an obvious time line fault with the show's narrative and does not match up. Spike comes to town in 2x03 "School Hard," which is late September/early October of 1997 (Buffy's junior year, as stated numerous times throughout the novel). This book takes place in late May 1998. It's been less than a year that Spike has been in Sunnydale, and dialogue in School Hard implies that he had no idea a Slayer lived in Sunnydale until the Anointed One told him.
Also, what qualifies as a "child-vamp"? What's the cutoff age? The Anointed One was supposed to be about 9 or 10, and I think Callie was listed as being around 7. What made the Anointed One more acceptable as a mature vampire than Callie?