Review: Jedi Apprentice

If you are reading this on the Escapist (and you probably are, since at the moment only two people are following my blog. [and one of them is me.]), then you might remember my earlier review of Darth Bane (but probably not, for reasons I will get to in a moment.) If so, you would know that I am reading through every Star Wars novel in chronological order and reviewing them, because I am just that much of a pathetic excuse for a manchild.

If, against all odds, you do remember my Darth Bane review, then you may be wondering "what is taking this guy so long?" Well, my friends, the Jedi Apprentice series is twenty books long.

Sure, they are "Young Adult" novels and not very long individually (the series having started a year before Harry Potter came along and proved that the average middle school student actually does have an attention span longer than that of Fred Figglehorn.), but still, there are twenty of them. That adds up.

Anyway, Jedi Apprentice was conceived as a tie-in to The Phantom Menace, and book one was published roughly simultaneously with that film. Book one takes place several years before the film.

The series begins with a pubescent Obi-Wan (The main character is the same age as the target demographic! This is a new and innovative marketing ploy that has never been seen before! Boy, those folks at Scholastic sure are clever!) at the Jedi Temple trying to win the approval of Qui-Gon Jinn so he can become his Padawan (which is another word for apprentices in Star Wars for some reason.) The first couple of books get off to a bumpy start. Dave Wolverton's prose does not have much energy to it, and the fight scenes are just disorienting. The first book just raises lots of questions that will not be answered until later--not questions of the "What an intruiging mystery!" sort either, but rather of the bad "What are these people talking about? Who is that? Why did that just happen?" sort.

Fortunately another author, Jude Watson, picks up the series starting with book two, and carries it from thereon out. Watson answers all the questions Wolverton left dangling, then proceeds to make me ask a few more:

"Why have I never heard of these books before?" "Why were they not bestsellers?" "Why were they never nominated for a Newberry Medal?"

Sadly, I still have no answers to these questions.

The series follows what the good folks at TVtropes would call the "AdventureTown" format: At the start of a book, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are given a mission by the Jedi Council to go solve some problem on some planet. They go there, and either by the end of the book or by the end of the next one, they have solved the problem. On the way, character development happens, and lots of it.

The most commonly levied complaint against The Phantom Menace is that it has poorly-developed characters with little personality. I agree with that. That is why this series so surprised me.

In the movie, Qui-Gon was an emotionally dead piece of wood with no background or motivation besides "Dur, hur, I'm a Jedi." In the books, Qui-Gon is a legendary warrior who covers up his sorrow at his own past failures and his stress at suddenly becoming a father-figure to a boy he hardly knows with a mask of serenity. In the movie, teenage Obi-Wan is a winy waste of screentime who does nothing but complain and then kill one guy at the very end. In the books, teenaged Obi-Wan is an idealistic young person caught between boyhood and manhood, struggling to find his own identity and an understanding of the Jedi way.

Over the course of their adventures, the Hyphenated Duo have to not only work out the problems of the planets they visit but also of themselves, and have to learn to trust one another in spite of their own flaws.

Oh, and what adventures! Whereas the problem they have to solve in The Phantom Menace is simply evil robots trying to take over a planet for underexplained reasons, Jedi Apprentice deals with much more complex and darker issues, especially considering it is a kids' series. The worlds of the decadent Republic are torn by civil wars, racism, gang violence, corporate corruption, and interclass strife.

In spite of this, the series keeps a consistantly optimistic tone. Our heroes always meet good people on their missions, and always leave a planet at least a little better off than it was when they arrived. There seem to be no issues that cannot be tackled with the Jedi virtues of, as the back covers declare, "peace, honor, and strength."

Oh, and there is a really great villian named Xanatos. I will not talk about him here, since I already wrote an essay on what makes him such an excellent antagonist.

Basically, if you like Star Wars, read it. If you have no feelings about Star Wars, read it anyway!

Oh, and in case anyone asks: I will not be reviewing the two Old Republic novels that came out this year. One reason is that I am trying to enjoy Star Wars history in chronological order, and reading them would be backtracking. The other reason is that I doubt they will have much impact on the rest of the Expanded Universe beyond the computer game that they are tie-ins to. (I expect that computer game to crash and burn faster than a Star Destroyer in the Kothol Rift. That's an issue for another time, though.)