First Star Wars books I've read and was very satisfied. ( )

All of the Star Wars prequel films have had novelizations, of course, and most of them have also had lead-in/lead-out books published just beforehand and just after. The Phantom Menace had Cloak of Deception and Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter just before it and then Rogue Planet picked up a couple years after it. Attack of the Clones had The Approaching Storm just before it and of course a slew of Clone Wars material after it, beginning with Shatterpoint. Revenge of the Sith was no exception-- while Matthew Stover wrote the novel of the film itself, James Luceno wrote two books that happen around it. Labyrinth of Evil takes place before, ending literally just moments before the film starts, while Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader picks up a month or so after Order 66. An omnibus collecting this "trilogy" has been rumored basically since the constituent books were announced, so I've held off buying any of those books all this time. Only three years after they all came out, I finally own them myself.

James Luceno's Labyrinth of Evil is a pretty unremarkable book. It's the story of Obi-Wan and Anakin's last missions in the Clone Wars, as they attempt to track down Darth Sidious and figure out what's going on in the Clone Wars. That's the nice part of this whole thing-- the prequel movies consistently show us Jedi being manipulated, and it's a bit frustrating. Labyrinth shows us that the Jedi know they're being manipulated, and that they're trying to do something about it. But little do they know the extent of their manipulation, and until they figure it out, they have to keep on fighting the wars. But beyond that, there's little to recommend this book. The characters are flat and uninteresting, the witty banter is anything but, and the Lucenopedia's constant continuity references rapidly become aggravating. But it's competent enough-- Luceno does write a decent action sequence-- and it moves along at a good pace. So it's a bit like suffering through Attack of the Clones, really. And it's nice to see the Jedi pull ahead-- they're so close to figuring out what's going on, close enough that Palpatine has to accelerate his plans and attack Coruscant as a distraction. (The size of that man's distractions rival most people's main events.)

That of course brings us straight to Revenge of the Sith, the adaptation of the worst film in the Star Wars franchise. But on the other hand, it's being penned by Matthew Stover, the best writer in the franchise. Can he save this travesty? Sort of. The book is good. And I mean, really really good. Stover's prose doesn't belong in the same book as Luceno's; it's miles better in every sense of the word. The first fifteen pages give more of a sense of camaraderie and friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin than all of Labyrinth. And character is where this book excels over all; all the characters (okay, basically Anakin) make the same stupid decisions that they do in the film, but in a novel, these can at least be explained through internal dialogue and such. And Stover does a brilliant job of making Anakin seem thoroughly trapped, manipulated by Palpatine into doing exactly what the man wants. The books falls apart when the movies does, though-- the second half where it just becomes a series of uninteresting, loosely-connected fight scenes, capped off with the newly born Darth Vader shouting "DO NOT WANT!" As an adaptation of a dreadful film, this book as is good as it can be. It fact, it's often downright fantastic. Not even Stover can save something as misguided and poorly written as Revenge of the Sith, though he can spare from the acting and direction. I think it's telling that there's almost no scenes written from Padmé's perspective-- and the ones that are come across as super-creepy.

Luceno's Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader wraps up this loose trilogy by showing us Anakin as he transitions into being Vader. Unfortunately, nothing interesting happens in this book. There's some all right Vader bits, but most of this book is focused on some Jedi escaping Order 66. They're not even Jedi we've seen before; they're all new characters. This is a shame, because Luceno certainly can't make me care about them, so at least I could inherit sympathy from some other book. But alas not. This one plods on for forever, and it took me twice as long to read as the rest of the book put together because it was just so uninteresting. C-3P0 and R2-D2 get some good bits, though.

Overall, it's a bit of a mess as a trilogy. Labyrinth and Revenge work together well enough-- they're not exactly two halves of one story, it's more that Labyrinth is the first half of a story that gets cut off by a whole new story in Revenge. And then Dark Lord has got nothing to do with either, not really. The sharp differences between Luceno's pedestrian writing and Stover's exceptional work don't really help this thing cohere either. But Labyrinth is decent at least, and Revenge is mostly fabulous. Worth it for those two, at least, I guess.