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Reading: Tatooine Ghost (Troy Dennison)
I really need to work out a better booklog system. The end-of-the-month smorgasboard makes for long entries, but the individual entries seem to just wind up clumped together at the end of the month. Grr.
Anyway. The summary: Four hundred pages of Han and Leia chasing after Killick Twilight, a stunning piece of Alderaanian art that happens to conceal a code key to a spy communication network. The mission: buy or destroy the the painting to keep its concealed key out of Imperial hands. Too bad the Imperials are suddenly more competent than expected, and really too bad local Kitster Banai stole the painting, leading to a chase across Tatooine and Skywalker family history to get it back.
The backtalk: Tatooine Ghost is fairly fun, but way too long. Denning does a good job of pulling together plot and character arcs from previous SW material (the two prequel movies, The Truce of Bakura, The Courtship of Princess Leia, some background for Zahn's trilogy) and has a lot of fun with that aspect, but fell down on tying together the novel's two driving ideas. Much is made of Leia's ambivalent feelings - well, more like unshakable disgust - about dad Anakin. Shmi's diary was a nifty device for reminding Leia that she has other Skywalker relatives, but it doesn't do much else. There's no real thematic connection between the search for Killick Twilight and the Skywalker family history trip; the hunt "conveniently" touches down on a number of historically important places - the podracing arena, the Lars - now Darklighter - homestead, Obi-Wan's Tatooine hut, the site of Anakin's Tusken slaughter - but there's no thematic or emotional resonance between the two. They twist around each other without touching, following their own tracks instead of dovetailing or merging. It's fairly frustrating, because there's got to be a way Denning could have exploited the comparisons between Leia's Alderaanian past - art (high culture), politics, subterfuge and rebellion, wrapped into a painting-shaped symbol - and this trip to Tatooine, where her dad was born and her grandmother lived and died, to retrieve it. On a thematic level, it drives me crazy that the Shmi plot kind of wanders into the desert and dies without tying back more strongly to the Killick Twilight material. Maybe I'm over-analyzing, or missing something obvious, but it's an itch the book doesn't scratch for me.
Also, it's very easy to tell this was written pre-Ep3. There's plenty of Ep 1 and Ep 2 nods, but there's a sense of a narrative hole where there could've been comments about Obi-Wan's really early years on Tatooine, or how Luke got to Tatooine, or a bit on the rise of the Empire. Again, it's something that bothers me all out of proportion to its prominence in the narrative.
On a less profound note, the three squibs just annoy me from the first moment they appear until they waltz off the page. I suspect it's one of their major narrative purposes. The unhappy naming coincidence doesn't help either. (HP/Star Wars. There's too many archetypes in common for this train of thought to end well.)
On the other hand, watching Our Heroes' reactions as the Imperials suddenly prove to know which end of the gun to hold is way too amusing. Longtime EU fans can pick up the clues and guess that Grand Admiral Thrawn's just offstage, but Han and Leia don't have a clue.
Take my grumbling with a grain of salt. It's a SW novel, after all, which makes it sort of fluffy reading by definition. The length was the real killer; 250 or 300 pages of action with numerous nods to related material is fun, but the rest is just filler.
Anyway. The summary: Four hundred pages of Han and Leia chasing after Killick Twilight, a stunning piece of Alderaanian art that happens to conceal a code key to a spy communication network. The mission: buy or destroy the the painting to keep its concealed key out of Imperial hands. Too bad the Imperials are suddenly more competent than expected, and really too bad local Kitster Banai stole the painting, leading to a chase across Tatooine and Skywalker family history to get it back.
The backtalk: Tatooine Ghost is fairly fun, but way too long. Denning does a good job of pulling together plot and character arcs from previous SW material (the two prequel movies, The Truce of Bakura, The Courtship of Princess Leia, some background for Zahn's trilogy) and has a lot of fun with that aspect, but fell down on tying together the novel's two driving ideas. Much is made of Leia's ambivalent feelings - well, more like unshakable disgust - about dad Anakin. Shmi's diary was a nifty device for reminding Leia that she has other Skywalker relatives, but it doesn't do much else. There's no real thematic connection between the search for Killick Twilight and the Skywalker family history trip; the hunt "conveniently" touches down on a number of historically important places - the podracing arena, the Lars - now Darklighter - homestead, Obi-Wan's Tatooine hut, the site of Anakin's Tusken slaughter - but there's no thematic or emotional resonance between the two. They twist around each other without touching, following their own tracks instead of dovetailing or merging. It's fairly frustrating, because there's got to be a way Denning could have exploited the comparisons between Leia's Alderaanian past - art (high culture), politics, subterfuge and rebellion, wrapped into a painting-shaped symbol - and this trip to Tatooine, where her dad was born and her grandmother lived and died, to retrieve it. On a thematic level, it drives me crazy that the Shmi plot kind of wanders into the desert and dies without tying back more strongly to the Killick Twilight material. Maybe I'm over-analyzing, or missing something obvious, but it's an itch the book doesn't scratch for me.
Also, it's very easy to tell this was written pre-Ep3. There's plenty of Ep 1 and Ep 2 nods, but there's a sense of a narrative hole where there could've been comments about Obi-Wan's really early years on Tatooine, or how Luke got to Tatooine, or a bit on the rise of the Empire. Again, it's something that bothers me all out of proportion to its prominence in the narrative.
On a less profound note, the three squibs just annoy me from the first moment they appear until they waltz off the page. I suspect it's one of their major narrative purposes. The unhappy naming coincidence doesn't help either. (HP/Star Wars. There's too many archetypes in common for this train of thought to end well.)
On the other hand, watching Our Heroes' reactions as the Imperials suddenly prove to know which end of the gun to hold is way too amusing. Longtime EU fans can pick up the clues and guess that Grand Admiral Thrawn's just offstage, but Han and Leia don't have a clue.
Take my grumbling with a grain of salt. It's a SW novel, after all, which makes it sort of fluffy reading by definition. The length was the real killer; 250 or 300 pages of action with numerous nods to related material is fun, but the rest is just filler.