It’s a shorter post this time as the Clone Wars books begin to wrap up. Once again, we have a pretty stark contrast between two books which is a shame.
Jedi Trial
Wow. This book has some of the worst pacing ever. The book is basically one giant battle on a planet and Anakin and Nejaa don’t even get there until 100 pages in. To top it off, about half the book is centered around two soldiers from the planet that I never end up caring about. If this is supposed to be the Anakin book to balance out the Obi-Wan book… it kinda fails because of that ratio. Oh. And the villain is just one big tropefest and not in an entertaining David Eddings sort of way.
This might be the first book that I’ve reread for this project that is worse than I remember it being and I honestly have always wanted to like this book. I remember being incredibly excited when I heard that it would also be featuring Nejaa Halcyon and he really is the saving aspect of the book. I do actually like the friendship between him and Anakin and it’s nice that they are this little fraternity of Jedi Who Shouldn’t Be Married But Are. (Mark Nejaa down as another friend that Anakin desperately needed and should’ve chatted with BEFORE making horrible life decisions.) Unfortunately, Nejaa never really gets much character development outside of the mission and his friendship with Anakin. It would be nice if we could get an e-short story about him one day. (HEY DEL REY. MAYBE GIVE STACKPOLE A CALL.)
Bottom line is that it’s not terrible but it’s not good either. To take that a bit further, I think that the moral of my Clone Wars book reviews has been that most of these books are good… except for the ones focusing on our main heroes from the films which is rather unfortunate.