Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Master & Apprentice



Just finished reading this new book, Master & Apprentice (Claudia Gray, 2019). I was looking forward to it, as I loved Claudia's first SW foray, Lost Stars. This one didn't do it for me, sadly. I like Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, but the other characters and situations and locations were not interesting enough to fully engage my attention. The time period of the tale is 40 BBY (8 years before Episode I).

We meet a basically failed Jedi, who was a Padawan to Count Dooku before Qui-Gon. We meet some jewel thieves. We learn about a planet under the thumb of a powerful intergalactic megacorporation. We are thrust into an awkward and failing Master-Padawan relationship--not sure I got from previous stories the idea that Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are/were in quite such a mismatched and strained relationship. They seem better by the end of this story, to be sure, but the initial situation depicted herein is bleak.

We see too many ham-fisted episodes of foreshadowing: attempts to explain too many otherwise irrelevant details from future stories. We cross a number of lines, Jedi-etiquette-wise, and toss in some anachronistic phrases here and there that kill the suspension of disbelief. We see a climax with a twist that we aren't invested in and can't quite bring ourselves to care about.

As with any novel coming in the time before (or between) major Star Wars events depicted in the movies, there is a challenge to come up with a plot that is interesting enough to be worth reading and yet does not outshine the movies themselves in scope and sweep (we accept the movies to be the most impressive events that happened during their respective periods of history). Some books pull that off nicely. I don't think this is one of them.

That being said, there are a ton of new books on the horizon, as we move toward Episode IX. I don't think I'm all that interested in any of them. You can read about them here, on the Star Wars website:

https://www.starwars.com/news/journey-to-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-publishing-program

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