AUTHOR: Ryder Windham
AGES: 7th - 10 Grades
REVIEW: As other reviews have noted (see Amazon's site and The Comlink), the storyline for this juvenile novel tracts along all six movies very closely. It was evident from the editing that decisions were made about what to include with details and what to exclude. It seems as though page count dictated the plot. In many cases, I would like to have seen more details and space given to more of the action portions of the story. For example, after Count Dooku is beheaded, we are told in just a few sentences that Anakin flew Palpatine, Obi-Wan Kenobi and R2-D2 back to Coruscant, because Anakin can fly anything. There were too many instances of this throughout the book for it to be engaging and powerful. I understand that this short novel had to span 6 book and over two decades of characters and events, and the pace had to meet characteristics of young readers. Too much was abridged, though.
The best parts of the book, however, were those small shards that gave us insight into Anakin's broken psyche. In a number of instances, we learned about Vader's motivations and his feelings that he attempted to ignore. We were also treated to some references to stories that took place outside of the six novels, bringing in some of the expanded Star Wars universe beyond the Lucas vision. These jewels, I thought, were the book's greatest strength. We saw some connections between what happened after Empire and before Jedi. We saw allusions to Vader's first inclinations of Luke and Leia. We heard of Vader's retreat. These extended the story we all could recite. These make the book worth reading. But there were too few of these to make it worth buying.
The Comlink makes the suggestion for taking this novel and rewriting for adults. I would second that. This is the atypical direction, though. Most novels get the juvenile adaptation. We'd like to see the mature adaptation and don't disappoint us.
RSS Feed