Excellent review! Thanks for posting it. I had pretty much the same reaction to the book. I’m such a huge fan of the show that I consider the book was worth my time and money for the sake of seeing a little more of what was going on inside Snow and Emma’s heads, but just barely.
I didn’t mind the occasional changes in dialogue. Even though some of the changed dialogue was pretty bad, most of the changes were neutral and a few even even improved on the original, given that they had to be presented in written form without the visual impact of seeing the actors’ delivery. At least the changes kept the book from being as stale as simply reading a copy of the scripts. Alas, like you, I can’t find much else to say about this book that is good.
I suspect you are right that the book was rushed into print and that may be the cause of many of its flaws. How else can we explain the decision to leave out several episodes when the book was not that long to begin with? Considering that the story is presented from Emma and Snow’s point of view, it is surprising that they chose to leave out “True North”. While it was not an episode that advanced the overall plot, the Storybrooke portion afforded a lot of opportunities to evoke Emma’s memories and see her changing thoughts. The same could be said of “That Still Small Voice”; that episode would have provided a lot of opportunity for exploring Emma’s relationship with Regina and her developing feelings for Henry. The necessary background information from the flashbacks of both episodes could have easily been provided by the usual device of having Henry give a quick summary from his book.
As you mention, screen-to-book adaptations are generally much worse than book-to-screen adaptations. Isaac Asimov once told a story about getting the contract to write a novelization of the movie, Fantastic Voyage. According to him, not only did the book suffer because he was under intense time pressure, but the publishers cut out the best of what he wanted to add to the story and insisted he include other things that ruined the book. Even as gifted a writer as Asimov couldn’t turn the result into a very good book.
Even though I didn’t care much for the book, like you, I’m sure I’ll buy the next one they release – partly because I want to support the show (every penny ABC makes from merchandising makes keeping the show on the air that much more attractive to them) and partly because I hope they’ll find the books profitable enough to continue a long series of them. If they do, hopefully we’ll eventually get a few books that are really good and explore aspects of the story which weren’t presented on screen.