Shadows of the Empire

   It was Ebay time again to search for copies of the next books and while waiting I back tracked to a book I missed, Shadows of the Empire.

  Apparently this novel originated from a video game of the same name. I really can’t say I cared for it a whole lot. Maybe if I had played the game it would been a little better. Maybe. But I felt as I was reading it, this could be a whole lot better… It takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  If you ever noticed there is a lapse in time between the two movies. This book fills in the blank.

  The connection between the siblings was kinda a nice touch though still rang a little on the author’s part of, oh, it would be really cool if I can make this point, and forces it into the story. The author’s writing style bugged me. It read a bit like a movie script and jumped back and forth and back and forth which wasn’t awful but just because Star Wars started out as a movie does not mean novelizations have to read like a movie as well… I personally like novelizations of movies cause they can tell a story with so much more detail and depth. I’ve read some people’s reviews and they like fast pace and jumping around like the movies and that’s their right but novels seem to me are a whole different medium and can’t be treated like a movie without selling yourself short.
  Secondly, I just didn’t like the author’s writing. It was just bad, in an amateurish way.

  What really bugged me was the story line which I guess you can’t blame the author being they had to go with the story line from the game but it was… just not great. Things didn’t jive. The Empire doesn’t like aliens yet the main villain is an alien competing with Darth Vader for the Emperor’s favor? I disagreed with some of the author’s views on some aspects of the story and the way things work in the SW world as well. Some of the twist of the story was just kinda out there.  It did not seem like a likely set of event that leads to Return of the Jedi.
 Another thing that bugged me was in TheEmpire Strikes Back the end is a shocker finding out that Darth Vader could be Luke’s father! What kind of emotional state would that put Luke in? The events are continuously pushed back for later thought in this novel. He just finds out this crazy news and he’s going to set it aside and not think about! What?! I would think he would be quite preoccupied with all sorts of scenarios at that point! He was a mess at the end of The Empire Strikes Back! How did he get from that to where he was when he appears in ROTJ. It did explain one part of ROTJ I had wondered about so I will give it that but to sum of the whole book, it could have been better, more creative, and fulfilling to the original trilogy.