The RebeLibrarian

From the Mind of Zahn

by Timothy Zahn.

How good a sign is it when my overwhelming impression of a book to tell you is that “yeah, I didn’t mind reading it.” I gave this book two out of five stars. A common theme in positive reviews is how much everyone has enjoyed the humanization of Stormtroopers; I actually am not going to deviate from that because I agree that this was the book’s chief selling point. Granted, there was little enough else going for it — a small corps of troopers desert the Empire because they have a problem with what the Empire is ordering them to do. The characters are believable, compelling, and interesting. A young Mara Jade is an interesting addition, and I enjoyed getting a glimpse of her at work as the Hand.

Still, there were complaints. Aren’t there always? I get fed up with Zahn’s absolute preoccupation with the Empire as a “speciesist” organization, mostly because he’s got three quarters of the rest of the Star Wars Authors believing it, when there isn’t the smallest amount of proof toward such a hypothesis. Ask me about that sometime.

I guess my biggest complaint was Zahn sampling his own work. A lot of Thrawn-Trilogy references and reflections that weren’t necessary because such shout-outs usually aren’t necessary, and the Ghost-of-Obi-Wan didn’t belong in here any more than he belonged in the Thrawn trilogy. Oh, well.

Not a bad little read. Not a good one, either. Canon, but not “necessary.” Check it out on Amazon.com.

This entry was posted on 4 March 2012 at 12:00 PM and is filed under Reviews, Spotlight with tags books, expanded universe, star wars canon, Timothy Zahn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.