Missing cover

I wanted to like this book. It is rated very well but I don’t see it. The book is too long, over 600 pages where I feel that less than half of that would have been adequate for this story.

The book is set sometime after the movies. Han and Leah have their twins. It has a few settings, all new places to this universe.

The book starts of very poorly. It felt like the author was putting words down just to get past the setup. Corran’s wife is kidnapped. He knows she was kidnapped and is held in stasis, but nothing else. This started off feeling wrong. Maybe the stasis is explained in the end, but it doesn’t seem rational. Nor why he can ascertain that and nothing else. It was just a setup so he has ample time to mess around becoming a powerful Jedi.

Other characters from the movie appear. Luke, the most prominent, doesn’t seem reasonable from the movie settings. He seems to fall out of character when Corran needs to make a point – mostly to the reader.

Backstory for Corran is often provided through dialog. As in “You remember when…” Then two characters discuss something in detail that both of them know.

Corran encounters lots of odd characters. Yet many of them appear only briefly and provide a critical skill or give him equipment he direly needs and didn’t realize he needed.

The writing is mediocre. The story line seemed interesting, but someone else should have told it. He goes to excess in making up words to create an otherworldly feel. It mostly just slows down the reading, although I do believe he has some skill at creating words that provide a good feel for the situation or thing described.

It felt contrived and overly dragged out with weak supporting characters. ( )

If one can forget the totally unrealistic start of the main storyline (the main character`s wife kidnapped so he decided to.... go studying to be a jedi), it`s a fairly entertaining above average although a bit overwritten SW book. ( )

It's amazing what they used to jam into Star Wars books; this is like 3 different arcs in one. It's fine content but there's a lot of weird heterosexuality (not like that the straightness itself is weird, just how it's phrased?) The whole thing at the beginning with the baby plot was uncomfortable, and I never want to read the word "loins" in another Star Wars book if I can help it, because it appeared WAY too many times here. Also it spans a lot of other books, which is cool if you know what happened there but could be confusing. It wasn't a terrible book, there were just a number of moments that made me roll my eyes. ( )

good, fills in SW[Star Wars] universe ( )