Jedi Trial (Star Wars: Clone Wars Novel) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)In some way Jedi Trial isn't as bad as The Cestus Deception, in some ways a bit worse, but it's inconceivable to me why it's the worst books they're releasing in hardcover these days, leaving the far superior entries, like Hard Contact and Dark Rendezvous, to paperback.
This book is basically a sustained battle scene, and as far as that goes it's okay -- and it's very clear that these writers know their tactics and strategy when it comes to large military engagements -- but, with a few notable exceptions ("the Avenger"), the action doesn't achieve much intensity, nor does it show us anything particularly interesting or innovative. While the sheer scale -- 1,000,000 battle droids vs 70,000 biologicals -- is pretty impressive, the battles in both Shatterpoint and Hard Contact were more engaging, with more kinetic action and more interesting, thoughtful engagements. So while there is a lot of action, none of it's particularly interesting, and it comes at the expense of character.
The characters for the most part are interchangeable and without character -- take any snippet of dialogue, and for the most part it could easily be attributed to any of the characters in the novel. Characters are just introduced and then imperiled before we have any idea who they are, let alone any reason to care for them, and they never seem to develop throughout the book; the chock romance is particularly clumsily handled -- "Everyone I know just died!" "Hey! Me too! Ah, well, let's be buddies!" "Great!" "Cool, now you're an honorary fighter jock!" "I love you!" pretty much sums up the character development in this book. The clones also acted a little off, compared to how they've been portrayed in other sources. Though it was cool to finally see Anakin gain some sense of the big picture, of command, so that we can actually believe that he will grow into such a fearsome military man as Vader is reputed to be.
Also, I kept thinking I was reading a YA novel. The prose was clumsy and boring, with simple sentences and often awkward paragraph structure -- and more typos than are usually found in Star Wars novels. And the authors had an exceedingly annoying habit of showing us a thing, and then, just in case we were too stupid to pick it up, spelling it out for us explicitly. We're not stupid, fellas. We can pick up what's going on, and don't need you to tell us two or four times.
And the Jedi were wasted. We have our Troubled Young Jedi and another Jedi who's got his own problems -- and they don't get to do anything. For the most part, they don't do anything much with the Force, they don't act particularly competent, they don't act particularly serene or Jedi-like, and apart from one scene, there isn't even any cool lightsaber action.
All of what should have been the most interesting scenes in this book are glossed over with throwaway lines, which is also very frustrating.
This isn't a completely awful book, but it's short and sophomoric enough that it would have been much better off as a paperback supplement novel than an "event" hardcover. And it's truly a shame than one of the much finer Star Wars novels out there will probably be often overlooked because it's a video game tie-in and overshadowed by this clunky, underwhelming hardcover with yet another busy Anderson cover.

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