Très décevant par rapport au titre précédent qui préparait pourtant quelque chose d'intéressant.

Well written, easy to read and fun!

It's been a few books but it's good to see the Han/Leia banter back:
"Vainglorious?"
"Vainglorious," Leia affirmed. "Vain plus glorious. Go ahead, deny it."
"Well...I can't, really."

Also Tam is turning out to be a great character (though this might be it for him, but we'll see).

Awesome ending. Good, clever strategy and the part with Wedge? *chef's kiss*

"Son, if you develop piloting skills in proportion to your nerve, someday they'll call you the greatest pilot of all time."

And Wedge's laughter the only response to Gavin's comment. Just perfection.

Just as I enjoyed Rebel Dream, Rebel Stand is one of the bright points for me in NJO. Allston puts together another fun narrative while maintaining the seriousness and gravity of the series as a whole. The time spent on Coruscant especially drives home this point. The Lord Nyax story line was riveting. One night it kept me reading for hours past what I wanted to because I refused to put the book down before it was resolved. Again, this book has rejuvenated my enthusiasm for NJO and I can't wait to read more by this author.

It was good

For 2021, I decided to reread Del Rey’s first attempt at a multi-author book series in the Star Wars universe: The New Jedi Order, which was published between 1999 and 2003. This shakes out to 19 novels, two eBook novellas, three short stories, and a tangentially-related prequel era novel.

This week’s focus: the second book in the Enemy Lines duology by Aaron Allston, Enemy Lines: Rebel Stand.

SOME HISTORY:

Dave Seeley made a number of covers for the Del Rey releases, from Star Wars Medstar (Battle Surgeons And Jedi Healer) to Outbound Flight, but his first two assignments were the covers for Allston’s Enemy Lines duology. Seeley worked as an architect for ten years before switching to illustration in 1995, and his works combine digital and traditional media--he would often create the covers digitally, and then use oil paints over top. Enemy Lines: Rebel Stand made it to number thirteen on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for the week of June 16, 2002.

MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:

I remembered the revelations about Lord Nyax, but not the build-up to those revelations, and despite Han and Leia’s presence on the cover I had forgotten everything that happened with them in this book.

PRINCESS LEIA COSTUME COUNT:

The Wraiths and Jedi sport very convincing Yuuzhan Vong disguises on Coruscant, and even Han and Leia break out some costumes during their mission to Aphran IV.

A BRIEF SUMMARY:

Wedge Antilles and his forces continue to defend Borleias against Czulkang Lah’s fleet, while Han Solo and Leia Organa set off on a series of missions for the newborn Rebel movement. But on Coruscant, the joint Wraith Squadron/Jedi team discovers a new threat in the New Republic’s former capital…

THE CHARACTERS:

As Rebel Stand opens, we're presented with the beginning of a number of subplots: Jaina Solo and her Twin Suns Squadron remain on Borleias under the command of Wedge Antilles, well aware that the Yuuzhan Vong are still trying to capture her; Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade, Tahiri Veila, and the members of Wraith Squadron are inserted on Coruscant and have started their mission to scout out what is happening to the world; Han Solo and Leia Organa set off on missions for Wedge’s Rebel movement; and Tam Elgrin, the former Yuuzhan Vong spy, awakens in the medical bay and tries to live with what he had done in the previous book.

The Coruscant mission takes up an awful lot of the book, and is a huge focus here (we'll put a pin in that and return to it for my Issues section). It's very interesting to see how much Coruscant has changed in just a matter of months, and how truly devastating the Yuuzhan Vong invasion has been. Millions of its inhabitants have died because very few people were able to escape during the events of Star by Star. The Yuuzhan Vong aren't just tearing down the buildings and removing the technology around them--they’re also altering Coruscant's orbit and changing how the planet behaves. Wraith Squadron is able to make contact with a group of survivors, but they slowly come to realize that their mission has to change. Coruscant won't possibly be able to return to what it once was, so rather than helping the people and letting them know that the New Republic forces will be back soon, it's more teaching them how to survive in a threatening, alien environment and hold out for an unknown span of time.

And while they're there, they discover a new threat: Lord Nyax. In keeping with the vision that Luke saw of Coruscant, there is a Dark Side presence there. Lord Nyax has the ability to manipulate people. He's very strong, and he's after something that for most of the book remains unclear--some source of power or some goal he's working towards that the reader and the Jedi/Wraith Squadron team are unaware of.

Luke comes to some revelations: mainly, that the Jedi's role is to stand firm. In some cases that does mean action, because if you're standing against an opposing force you can't just stand there passively--you do have to take an active stance at some point! Mara's portrayal felt a little cold compared to previous books--and that might just be her feelings regarding her absence from her son and uncovering Viqi Shesh’s presence on Coruscant--but it almost felt like a step back for Mara, back to the scary former assassin rather than the slightly more open woman we've gotten to know in some of the books.

Tahiri takes an entirely different approach to Lord Nyax’s influences--she uses some of the Yuuzhan Vong side of her to be able to counteract it. I wish we could have seen her doing more with that; the idea that she can manually cut herself off from the Force because of the Yuuzhan Vong shaping she went through is really interesting, and I would like to see more of an examination into it. It's cool, we just haven't seen it before--but I can suppose that as Tahiri comes to grips with herself, the death of Anakin, and everything that happened after it, she's also coming into better control of her abilities (and we might see more of those).

The Wraiths are a delight. I love Face; I love Kell; the new Wraiths are OK, but mainly I love Face and Kell. I love their banter, and I love that they were having some unspoken competition to see who could stay in their Yuuzhan Vong armor the longest despite the discomfort--that feels so much like them.

On the Jaina, Jag, and Kyp front: I didn’t get the sense from Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream that Jaina had completely solved her problems, but I suppose she’s coping with her situation and good for now. She’s in a relationship with Jagged Fel for now. I’ll just have to accept that there won’t be any further development with her until Destiny's Way or the subsequent books. (Side note: Jaina’s talk with Kyp about their partnership was very awkward to me, and I think it came down to Jag’s presence there. I know it was Jag’s idea for her to talk with Kyp, but that should have been a private conversation!)

Han and Leia’s missions don’t feel particularly important or like they’re moving the plot forward, so while it was nice to see them interact their scenes weren’t essential to the story. The first mission ended up being much simpler than I thought (I assumed Han and Leia were going to support the unnamed third candidate and play the other two off each other), and the second mission didn’t go as planned because the Falcon is too recognizable.

Tam Elgrin finds that a lot of people on Borleias do distrust him; he takes little Dab/Tarc (the boy that Viqi Shesh made to look like Anakin Solo) under his wing, and he uncovers a spy of his own. In the end he and Wolam Tser and little Tarq leave for points unknown--but presumably they're all going to be very happy making holo-documentaries together.

I wanted more with Wedge and Tycho. I enjoyed that we got to see them interact in the very beginning with Wes Janson (Janson! His presence makes me so happy!), but then it didn’t feel like we saw a lot of Wedge until the last 70 pages. Fortunately, the last 70 pages made up for that. My favorite parts have always been when Wedge has to use his skills or intellect to get himself out of an impossible situation, and that’s exactly what happened in the end. (But we will also put a pin in that, and return to it.)

On the Yuuzhan Vong front, we have the Warmaster Tsavong Lah realizing that there’s a plot between the shapers and the Yun-Yuuzhan priests (thanks to Nen Yim’s analysis), and the plotters are all killed by rancors, death by something Yuuzhan Vong being too good for them. So he’s got that problem sorted; he’s not going to be a Shamed One and he’s not going to lose his command. Viqi Shesh is assigned to the warrior Denua Ku to track down the Jedi on Coruscant, and in typical Viqi Shesh she escapes several times and finds an escape ship. After the Wraiths and the Jedi steal her ship, Viqi decides that she wants to choose her death on her own terms and throws herself out a window. (Farewell Viqi, you Kuati cockroach.) I continue to find Commander Czulkang Lah interesting; he continues his bombardment against Borleias, but in the end he and the Domain Hul worldship are destroyed because Wedge fed him false information. Wedge’s plot was to hide what he was really doing and leak what he wanted the Vong to assume he was doing, and Czulkang Lah falls for it. I wish we could have seen more of him, but I will put a third pin in that thought.

ISSUES:

The first 80% of the book felt heavily weighted towards the Coruscant mission. We would occasionally check in on Jaina, or Tam Elgrin, or the progress on the Lusankya, or Czulkang Lah’s bombardments, but the majority of the time seemed to be spent elsewhere: on Coruscant with the Wraiths and Luke, or with Han and Leia on their missions to Vannix and Aphran IV. We cut back to Coruscant a lot because there's a lot going on there: there's all the revelations about what's happening to the planet; there’s the Wraiths’ attempts to contact survivors; and then there’s Luke’s discovery of Lord Nyax and their increasingly desperate attempts to stop him.

My problem here was that Lord Nyax seemed the most menacing the less we knew about him, like the threat in a horror film, and once we see and learn more about him he starts to get a little silly. I loved the scenes from his point-of-view: he’s trying to get into this wall, but he has no verbal skills and can only communicate by pushing thoughts into people’s heads. He doesn’t even have a name--the name he assumes is one that his minions gave him, that of a nightmare from the Corellian system. His sense of understanding is incomplete and warped.

But then we find out that he’s Irek Ismaren from Children of the Jedi, artificially induced to grow three meters tall, with armor embedded under his skin and lightsabers sticking out of every limb like a proto-General Grievous. He has no memory of who he is or what he should be doing, beyond some embedded sense of seeking out and possessing places of power. His backstory is honestly pretty sad (especially in regards to the fate of Roganda Ismaren) but a three-meter tall dude with lightsabers sticking out of every limb strikes me as an oddly goofy villain. The Jedi are able to defeat him precisely because he’s untrained (he’s operating on sheer instinct), but his looming threat gives the Coruscant mission the feeling of a wild goose chase. Instead of saving the galaxy, our heroes just went off after a red herring. But I suppose that was the point of the Coruscant mission, that they might not be able to retake it because the world will be irrevocably different.

The Coruscant mission’s monopoly on the plot wasn’t as huge of an issue as I originally thought, though, because the final Battle of Borleias was so good!! All of Wedge’s plots finally come into play--the fake Starlancer project (reminds me how Starkiller Base could fire beams halfway across the galaxy), and Operation Emperor’s Spear with the Lusankya, as well as the missile masquerading as Jaina Solo’s X-wing. And Wedge got to relive his former glory days in Blackmoon Eleven’s X-Wing and save a freighter, all while his comm unit doesn’t work and he’s missing an astromech. (Poor Wedge!) I just love that Wedge was able to hold Borleias for so long, and even when he decided to leave, his forces really made the Vong regret ever attacking it in the first place.

I wish we could have seen more of Czulkang Lah, because he was wily and interesting. He keeps his word, even when he thinks his orders are wrong, so I would have liked to see more of him--why he disagreed with the invasion plans and how his ideas differ from his son’s. The Yuuzhan Vong’s greatest strength has been their sheer numbers, but their weaknesses have been a rather poor understanding of strategy on an individual level. We have good strategists like Tsavong Lah and his father, but the Vong rely very heavily on the yammosks and external ways of keeping their troops unified and structured. Without the influence of the yammosk or a strong commander to hold everything together, they’re undisciplined and easily distracted, and even with those controls individual warriors tend to disobey orders to pursue matters of personal glory. I think (and I hope!) that the later books will show how the loss of their good leaders affects their invasion efforts, because at their core the Yuuzhan Vong are undisciplined and a bit too chaotic.

IN CONCLUSION:

More so than any of the three previous duologies, the Enemy Lines duology felt like one continuous story: Rebel Stand picks up not long after Rebel Dream ends, so you have to read Rebel Stand to get any sense of how events will end. It’s hard for me to judge them separately because you really have to read both of them! You need both the setup as well as the conclusion to accurately get a sense of what Allston was trying to accomplish. There are definitely things I can nitpick, but I love that our heroes got an overwhelming, undeniable victory here. I wish the book wasn’t quite so heavily weighted towards the Coruscant mission, but the Enemy Lines duology has been a nice change of pace after all the angst and drama that preceded it.


Next up: a Jacen-centric novel by Matthew Stover, Traitor.

My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/_knzsZqOFik

FAQs on Aaron Allston’s website: https://web.archive.org/web/200911231...

Run for Cover - Dave Seeley (September 1, 2005): https://web.archive.org/web/200509232...

“Luke, I don't want to discourage your curiosity, but I have to remind you, if something goes wrong, this is an exceptionally embarrassing way to die."

The curse is broken! It has finally happened! Aaron Allston's Enemy Lines II: Rebel Dream, the second half of the New Jedi Order's last duology, manages to both meet the standards of its predecessor and, dare I say, even succeed in my estimation - the NJO's duology model pays off greatly in its last iteration. While Rebel Dream's inherently jolly, triumphant tone is no longer as present here, this novel nevertheless delivers a greatly jubilant experience which satisfyingly concludes the Enemy Lines duology without ever quite falling into the same traps as its peers.

Coruscant

Of all the subplots which were built up in the previous novel, Luke's mission to Coruscant is the one I was most looking forward to with Rebel Stand, and, thankfully, the build-up was more than worth it. To sum up, Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade, Tahiri Veila, as well as a select few scientists and Wraith Squadron members are smuggled into Coruscant to make contact with its remaining population and establish an underground which could eventually help with retaking the New Republic's fallen capital. Allow me to start by talking a bit about Coruscant itself. Introduced in the Thrawn trilogy and later brought to the big screen with The Phantom Menace, Coruscant has been the "main player" of the EU's settings since pretty much day one. One giant cityscape, only interrupted by the Manarai Mountains and a couple of artificial resort areas, it has fascinated me since I first started delving into the Expanded Universe. The idea of a planet made up of so many buildings, so dystopian in a sense that buildings were ultimately stacked on top of one another to make room for more expansion - leading to the lower areas becoming abandoned and housing... biological anomalies - is simply one of the most interesting parts of the old EU to me. To see all of this worldbuilding come to a close in Star by Star was saddening, but it nevertheless gave way to a lot of narrative potential: how would the Yuuzhan Vong deal with this artificial hellscape, fittingly both their enemies' capital and perhaps the most offensive place in the galaxy for them? The answer is just as ingenious as it is horrifying; that is all I will say about it for now. As for the "strike team", they have great chemistry and interactions together. Allston's Luke is just such a jolly person, laughing at the face of danger and yet never feeling out of character. Mara, Tahiri, and Danni Quee are similarly great, though Danni still only exists to... do stuff in the plot, without ever developing further as a character. What a shame. Special mention has got to go to Face and Kell, who are just as gloriously funny here as they were in the Wraith trilogy.

As the team dives deeper into the city, making contact with local resistance cells, they hear legends of a nightmarish figure living on the planet, a figure bearing resemblance to a bogeyman from Corellian children's stories, referred to as... Lord Nyax. Oh boy. Spoiler warning from here. The figure is real, sort of. It turns out that this "Lord Nyax" is actually no other than Irek Ismaren, one of the antagonists from Barbara Hambley's Children of the Jedi. After the events of said novel, him and his mother fled to one of the Emperor's secret areas on Coruscant, where he underwent experimentation which, in the end, resulted in him growing three meters tall, having a metal armor including multiple lightsabers implemented beneath his skin, as well as the total loss of his identity as a sentient human being, with him becoming essentially a braindead monstrocity. Well. Fitting with his origin as a CotJ character - I mean just think about how ridiculous the idea of Luke "falling in love with a computer" was! - Nyax is often brought up as an example of just how silly and bad the Expanded Universe was by people who, naturally, never read any of it. So, where do I stand on this concept? I am of two minds about it. On the one hand, Nyax is, of course, completely outrageous; an idea so silly that it would make even the early Bantam era novels blush. I mean, come on, really? An artificially enhanced 3 meter tall guy who has lightsabers protruding out of his joints? I know that Allston was a jokester, but I can't help but wonder if he was deliberately trolling with this one, a meta dig at the sillier parts of the past EU. But on the other hand, he kind of... works as an antagonistic force...? As is typical with this author, he manages to marry silliness with deeply emotional matters in a compelling way, and yes, Lord Nyax is perhaps one of the best examples of exactly that. I think the emotional part comes from his ultimate fate. Irek's mother was an awful person, but still, to think that she would not just deliberately experiment on her son like that, but also continue to nurture him as the potential next Emperor after being pronounced braindead, is... heartbreaking. Luke's attempts at reaching him, only to realize he is too far gone to ever lead a normal life again is similarly disheartening. Nyax is a killing machine incapable of complex thought, sure, but his facial expressions nevertheless betray a sense of childish innocence to it all. Leave it to Aaron Allston to give the funny knee-lightsaber man some emotional weight.

Nyax is not the only antagonistic force present on Coruscant. Viqi Shesh, former NR senator and current traitor extraordinaire, has been ordered to accompany a group of Yuuzhan Vong and voxyn to Coruscant with the goal of dealing with reported jedi activity. Viqi has long been one of my favorite characters in this series, and Rebel Stand is her best appearance for sure. Now that she has managed to bluff her way out of capital punishment, only for that very bluff to turn out to have been true in a hilarious turn of events, she once more has to cling to her life, positioned between the NR and Nyax threat on the one side, and the Vong on the other. You reap what you sow, and being an infidel traitor doesn't leave you with a lot of options. One of Viqi's most enduring traits is that very ambition to stay alive, and it shines more in this novel than anywhere else. She works with the Vong, leaves the Vong, tries to reason with her fellow humans, is disgusted by the alien invaders' impulse to murder people, though only because they could still be useful to her, desperately tries to run from Nyax and other savages in the lower parts of Coruscant. Her storyline here is a constant fight for life, zigzagging between elation and depression by the minute, and it is exhilarating to read. Perhaps my favorite bit is when she comes across a working starship she could use to escape Coruscant, the Vong, and the New Republic for good, thinks she has finally escaped all her tormentors, but in the end has said ship stolen by the Wraiths and replaced by a taxi with a personalized note attached to it. Can't even blame Viqi for starting to cry then and there. Her story's conclusion is perfect, too. After both betraying her Yuuzhan Vong commander and being spotted by a vengeful Mara Jade, she is ultimately cornered by both parties, she gives up and commits suicide in a last act of defiance. "Yuuzhan Vong can't kill me. Noghri can't. Jedi can't. You're all beneath me. There's only one thing in this universe that can kill Viqi Shesh." Her tenure in the EU will not be forgotten.

Aphran System, Aphran IV

Han and Leia have a plotline in this novel too, one that brings some appreciated levity. It doesn't really accomplish much - the two travel to a planet, successfully influence its politics to adapt an anti-YV stance, travel to a different planet, get arrested, and flee - but it makes up for that with its fun character interactions. I don't think Hand and Leia will ever truly get over the Myrkr mission, but they have nevertheless managed to get it out of their system to where they can appreciate life again. And appreciate life they do; I think the banter between the two in the entire NJO, but especially here dare I say makes them a better pairing than Han and Chewie ever were. The real highlight are surprisingly Threepio and Artoo, though. Whereas Threepio has been mainly concerned with questions regarding sentience, emotion, and the futility of life in the face of the Vong's anti-technology bias and the events surrounding his "family", Artoo didn't get any focus so far. So it makes me glad that Allston allows him to stage a truly awesome prison escape in which he uses a reluctant Threepio as a courier, disguises a blaster and lightsaber as food, hacks into the entire facility, and single-handedly frees and flies the Falcon. I fear that neither of the two will get a lot more to do in the NJO, sadly, but I'm glad that Allston gave us at least this little bit of content.

Borleias

Now for Enemy Lines' main plotline, the defense of Borleias. This plotline's breakout star has got to be Tam Elgrin. Previously introduced as a holocam operator turned Yuuzhan Vong spy, Tam managed to resist his Vong programming and is currently residing in the Borleias biotics facility again. Facing feelings of guilt and purposelessness after the events of the last novel, he nevertheless tries his best to do something productive and have at least some positive effect on the people around him. As I already mentioned in my Emissary of the Void review, I really like it when the NJO shows us different perspectives on the now and then, and the story of this awkward man trying to right his own wrong is exactly that. He's joined by Tarc, the kid introduced in Star by Star as an Anakin Solo lookalike, who is similarly directionless and is ultimately given stuff to do by Tam and his superior. A solid conclusion to this character, too. The Jaina/Kyp/Jag trio doesn't do quite as much here as they did in the previous two books, but their contributions are welcomed still. Kyp seems to accept Jaina and Jag as a pair and thankfully move on from trying to be Jaina's master or even more; they're simply partners now. I really do hope that Kyp continues to get better from here, but with him you never know. Lastly for the smaller details, Wes Janson is back!!! Yes, the Rogue turned Wraith turned Rogue again turned Taanab Yellow Aces leader makes a cameo appearance here and, of course, steals the show. Rebel Stand is worth it for these scenes alone. I just wonder what Hobbie is up to... Anyways, in the main plot, Wedge Antilles and Czulkang Lah are continuing their battle of wits. The New Republic's best strategist facing up against what is ostensibly the Vong's best strategist makes for great reading, and it really is the constantly built-up trickery that turns the battle. That lambent-powered turbolaser attack against the Coruscant worldship? A fake. All of the Millennium Falcon's gravitic signatures which just started appearing in the system? A bit of forgery, too. And what about Jaina Solo's gravitic signature, for that matter? Not actually her, either. Czulkang remains a brilliant mind, one which I would have loved to have read a lot more about, but he was undone by the infidels' masterful strategy and his own people's limitations, in the end. By this point, it isn't sheer mass in numbers, but rather smart strategizing which will win the war. So it happens: The Super Star Destroyer Lusankya is not actually the fully operational weapon it appears to be, but rather a stripped down shell of its former self, currently operated with the single goal of ramming into Czulkang's worldship and taking both it and the still alive Ysanne Isard (god bless Isard's Revenge's ending) out. Ultimately, Czulkang simply accepts his fate like a true commander, never losing any of his dignity. What an awesome way to go out for this greatest of Yuuzhan Vong strategists.

To put it simply, Rebel Stand is a victory. It might not be quite as focused or "feel-good" as its predecessor, but it still features top of the line characterization, plotting, writing, comedy.. the whole package. Oh, to think that we were at our heroes' lowest point only three books ago. I suppose there's always a light at the end of the tunnel; I just hope that Jacen Solo sees things the same way. Enter the New Jedi Order's thirteenth part, Traitor by Matthew Stover. Sounds like a momentous occasion, that novel, huh?

I enjoyed the battle scenes and fun tactics employed by Wedge here in the defense of Borleias, as well as the growing friendship between Kyp, Jaina and Jag. And I even enjoyed the Lord Nyax arc. However, I didn't see the point of the latter within the context of this book. Just an interesting side story that they felt they must throw into one of the books, I guess.

As a whole, the Duology that is Enemy Lines I & II acts a pivot point in the narrative of Star Wars: The New Jedi Order. Considering the steps that Aaron Allston took in Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream to give the reader the indication that hope was still to be found, Rebel Stand does not fail to deliver an intriguing story.

Following the mold of the first book in the Duology, Rebel Stand sticks very close to some of the less Force-Sensitive Characters while still allowing the Jedi who are present in the story to shine. From Calrissian to Wedge, it is oddly rewarding for the reader to enjoy the oft overlooked Characters they have come to know from other series.

The story overall is fast paced. Unlike the introspection concerning the Force that seemed to play a major part in other books of the overall series, the reader is in constant motion throughout Rebel Stand. One moment the reader will find that they are caught in the Dejarik game over Borleias; the next they are thrust to the surface of Coruscant in pursuit of what could possibly be an even bigger threat to the Galaxy than the Yuuzhan Vong. If this were not enough, in the midst of all the action, subterfuge abounds. Though the different elements progress rapidly, the reader never feels as though they are losing their grasp on the overall story.

Now, the story does hit a few speed bumps toward the end. With all of the imaginative build up, the reader is left wishing for something far more nefarious to be found on the surface of Coruscant. This, however, does not last for long. With the flip of a page (or two), the reader is thrust into the midst of a battle which becomes the last stand of Borleias.

An interesting addition to the Star Wars: New Jedi Order series, but in no way unwelcome. The approach to the story that Aaron Allston takes is appreciated while not seeming out of place. The development of some of the new characters was strong, while not treating the existing in an uncharacteristic manner. The plot points were strong and the story was easy to follow. The perceived climax of the story may be the only place that leaves the reader a little perplexed.

Overall, it is an enjoyable read and acts as a strong midway point of the entire series.

Rebel Dream was interesting. I felt bad for Jana but It was a good story. I cant wait for Rebel Stand

Rebel Stand was the second book that I read by Allston - second to Rebel Dream. I have to admit, I was a little taken aback by his writing style because it seems more light and relaxed than other authors, and I wasn't really expecting it. Some authors in particular who shall remain nameless (James Luceno is long winded, isn't he?) seem to get a little stuffy with their explanations and when they try to add detail, they just go on and on and on and on. Allston doesn't do that. Instead, he gives you a basic framework on which you can expand. His books seem to be more focused on action as opposed to detail, which is nice when you consider that the series is 21 BOOKS LONG (including the e-novellas.)!

In all, the book moves quickly and is a really enjoyable read. There is usually a little joke coming at the end of a section, but it doesn't feel like he's sticking a joke in just to cut some of the tension. When things are tense, he usually doesn't give a joke. He is able to play on that tension to keep you engaged, but when the events start to calm down, the characters also do, and it's then that you get a little joke or two (the ones about C-3P0 are my favorites).

3.5 stars