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mpetruce's review against another edition
2.0
I've read a lot of movie novelizations. I imagine this one is what the Descriptive Audio For The Vision Impaired feature sounds like on the DVD for The Force Awakens. In the past the Star Wars novelizations had a little inner dialogue, some extra dimension, even scenes that were never in the movies that enhanced the understanding of the movie. But this is mostly -- not completely, but mostly -- what feels like a recitation of what happened on the screen. Foster is a great writer, so I'm wondering if he had a lot of rules to work under.
Now, the bonus of having a franchise property like this is that the audiobook narration is pretty good, and has the added bonus of being fully produced, with the original score, sound effects, explosions, BB-8, all of it. It is very entertaining. So, extra star for that.
Now, the bonus of having a franchise property like this is that the audiobook narration is pretty good, and has the added bonus of being fully produced, with the original score, sound effects, explosions, BB-8, all of it. It is very entertaining. So, extra star for that.
cassiflo24's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
informative
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
rhganci's review against another edition
3.0
A serious SW novel by a serious science fiction author – I loved seeing Anakin and Bariss interact.
jasnahkholin's review against another edition
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
3.0
so…
i figured out my problem with star wars novels: they focus more on plot then characters. im not saying that there arent strong charcater moments in this (and other sw books), but they are often set aside for the plot, battles, world descriptions, etc. this was my problem with revenge of the sith, but ultimately the characters + tragedy of that book pushed it to a 5 stars. for this…for the approaching storm…there just weren’t enough character moments for me to love this. there were some small scenes that i really loved, but i wish we had more time to explore character dynamics, especially bc i picked this book up bc someone said the obi-wan and luminara dynamic is great in this. it is good…for like the 4 scenes we got of them. i just want MORE…i’ve come to realize that im more of a character reader than plot, but it’s more like a 60% over 40%, so i still like a good plot. this book wasnt bad, but i will say it was a bit slow. i just want more exploration of character dynamics!!
if i were to go back and rate all the sw books, i would probably drop some of them down .5 rating, but i wont do that rn bc im lazy.
this book made me fall in love more with luminara she’s a queen
i figured out my problem with star wars novels: they focus more on plot then characters. im not saying that there arent strong charcater moments in this (and other sw books), but they are often set aside for the plot, battles, world descriptions, etc. this was my problem with revenge of the sith, but ultimately the characters + tragedy of that book pushed it to a 5 stars. for this…for the approaching storm…there just weren’t enough character moments for me to love this. there were some small scenes that i really loved, but i wish we had more time to explore character dynamics, especially bc i picked this book up bc someone said the obi-wan and luminara dynamic is great in this. it is good…for like the 4 scenes we got of them. i just want MORE…i’ve come to realize that im more of a character reader than plot, but it’s more like a 60% over 40%, so i still like a good plot. this book wasnt bad, but i will say it was a bit slow. i just want more exploration of character dynamics!!
if i were to go back and rate all the sw books, i would probably drop some of them down .5 rating, but i wont do that rn bc im lazy.
this book made me fall in love more with luminara she’s a queen
bernkastel's review
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
staatz's review against another edition
Classic young adult fiction that I'm sure will make for a few new readers. As it was done off early drafts of the script it is interesting to see how much it improved when they got rid of ham fisted romance and made Rey less of a damsel.
blancwene's review against another edition
2.0
For 2022, I decided to go back in time and reread all the Prequels Era novels published between 1999 and 2005, plus a smidgen of other novels (like [b:Survivor's Quest|46623|Star Wars Survivor's Quest|Timothy Zahn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330605305l/46623._SY75_.jpg|1197542] and the Dark Nest trilogy) released during that time frame. This shakes out to 21 novels, four eBook novellas, and at least thirteen short stories.
This week’s focus: an immediate prequel to Episode II: Attack of the Clones, The Approaching Storm by Alan Dean Foster.
SOME HISTORY:
Alan Dean Foster was one of the old school, pre-Bantam era Star Wars writers, having served as the ghostwriter for the novelization of [b:Star Wars: A New Hope|599090|Star Wars A New Hope (Star Wars Novelizations, #4)|George Lucas|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408936775l/599090._SY75_.jpg|123227] (the cover credits George Lucas) and then written 1978’s (very trippy) [b:Splinter of the Mind's Eye|35204|Splinter of the Mind's Eye (Star Wars)|Alan Dean Foster|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1402056438l/35204._SY75_.jpg|1107902]. His 2002 novel, The Approaching Storm, serves as a prologue to Episode II: Attack of the Clones, as the film mentions that Obi-Wan Kenobi had just returned from a border dispute on Ansion. The Approaching Storm made it to number twelve on the New York Times bestseller list for two straight weeks—from the week of February 17 to the week of February 24, 2002--and was on the list for four weeks.
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
This will probably be a common refrain with the prequel books, but while I assume that I read The Approaching Storm in 2002, I remembered nothing from it.
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
On the tiny but strategic planet of Ansion, a powerful faction is on the verge of joining the growing secessionist movement. The Jedi Council sends two Jedi Knights, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luminara Unduli, along with their Padawans Anakin Skywalker and Barriss Offee, to stabilize the planet's population. To succeed, the Jedi will have to fulfill impossible tasks, befriend wary strangers, and influence two great armies, followed all the while by an enemy sworn to see their mission fail…
THE CHARACTERS:
At its heart, The Approaching Storm is a road trip story with a heavy sprinkling of political intrigue. Our four Jedi are sent to Ansion to negotiate between the people of the cities—the Unity—and the people of the plains—the Alwari. They set off across the plains of Ansion to meet with the Alwari and get them to agree to terms with the Unity. Of course, there are people on Ansion that want to stop what the Jedi are doing, and there’s also that sprinkling of political intrigue: so we keep cutting away to the Ansionian politicians who are debating whether to secede from the Republic, and Shu Mai of the Commerce Guild and other senators and business people who are trying to influence Ansionian politics from Coruscant. The Approaching Storm serves to set up the Separatist conflict in Episode II, as we also get a sneak peak at Count Dooku at the very end.
On the road trip front, we have Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker joining Luminara Unduli and Barriss Offee on Ansion. After some initial negotiations with the city folk, they spend most of the book traveling across the plains of Ansion in search of the overclan of the Alwari. When I say that the road trip is the majority of the story, I’m not lying! There’s 97 pages of setup, and then the rest of the book is the Jedi’s journey. If you don’t like road trip stories…unfortunately, that’s the entire plot here. It is a little different from other road trip stories in that they don’t stop in towns (there are no towns) but instead encounter strange wildlife along the way. They meet four different tribes, but mostly it’s just the Jedi and their guides in pretty barren settings.
Luminara Unduli appeared very briefly in [b:Cloak of Deception|387506|Cloak of Deception (Star Wars)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349122895l/387506._SY75_.jpg|1016812], but we spend much more time with her here. She’s a good teacher, she doesn’t jump into action as Anakin is prone to do, she’s willing to listen to people, and she’s very talented. She’s athletic and flexible, and shows off her abilities in two different scenes: manipulating sand with the Force, and then retrieving some very rare wool out of a huge clump of herding beasts. She’s not a dueling master, but she’s very skilled in what she does.
We also meet her padawan, Barriss Offee. Barris has a very specific, rare skill set, and wants to be a healer. She doesn’t get along with Anakin, as she finds him reckless and impatient, so a lot of the story involves them having to learn how to work together.
There’s a lot of conflict within Anakin (setting things up for Attack of the Clones): he thinks he wants to be a great Jedi, but he doesn’t really know what he wants; he desperately wants to see his mother again; and he struggles with the Jedi’s sense of patience and calmness, because he comes most alive when he can rush into action.
And then Obi-Wan is here…of the four Jedi characters, I felt like Obi-Wan was fleshed out the least. We got Obi-Wan the dignified Jedi, but I felt like Foster was missing that essential sassy quality of Obi-Wan’s personality. It really came through with Ewan McGregor’s portrayal in the prequel films, and is lacking here—Obi-Wan’s propensity to good-naturedly snipe at anyone and everyone, but especially at Anakin.
Our heroes can’t seek out the Alwari tribes without guides, but I was not crazy about the guides here. I think it’s less the characters themselves, and more how they were portrayed within the story. Kyakhta and Bolgan are clanless Alwari, and Foster describes them as “mentally ill.” They’re hired by Soergg the Hutt to kidnap Barriss, but she recognizes there is some issue at play and heals them…and they instantly go from speaking broken English, to speaking perfect, dignified English. (I know within the constraints of the story they’re speaking Ansionian, but it’s written in English.)
I really did not like how this element of the story was addressed! 1) please do not conflate mental illness with what appears to be an intellectual disability, they are entirely different issues; 2) Bolgan’s condition seems to have been related to a childhood injury (he lost an eye and broke his back, and Barriss isn’t able to heal those old injuries) but we’re not given a story behind Kyakhta’s condition, he talked about “going mad”; 3) it felt like “the Jedi need guides, so let’s take these disabled individuals and have Barriss fix them up and they’re fine now” and I would have rather that this subplot was handled with more nuance, or just straight up dropped.
On their road trip, they also pick up another native species of Ansion: a Gwurran thief named Tooqui. He says “consider me a pet!” and Luminara says that he’s a sentient creature, not a pet, yet they still let him tag along with them? He’s there to rescue them from the Traders, but he’s an annoying companion.
I did like how Foster didn't portray the Alwari as backwards, or needing to be educated; that they want to keep their way of life, and the negotiations with the city folk were less about educating the Alwari and “bringing them up to the city folk standards,” and more what each group could learn from each other or benefit each other.
The main bad guy on Ansion is Bossban Soergg the Hut, and he tries very hard to kill the Jedi at various points—or failing that, to get them to leave Ansion. He has a native Ansonian majordomo named Ogomoor who does most of the dirty work for him. Ogomoor dies, but Soergg wiggles out untouched in the end (very Hutt-like of him).
Over on the Coruscant political intrigue front, we mostly have schemes involving Shu Mai, the president of the Commerce Guild. Shu Mai and her associates want Ansion to secede and join the Separatist movement because it’s at the center of lots of different alliances, and if Ansion left the Republic, it would hopefully spur its partners to leave as well. I did have to question how many people Shu Mai and her associates killed throughout the book: surely someone would have noticed all these suspicious deaths? But I guess the Republic is so rotting and corrupt at this point, that strange deaths go unnoticed.
ISSUES:
My biggest issue with The Approaching Storm was pace. The setup felt slow and unwieldy—Barriss being kidnapped by Kyakhti and Bolgan was so obviously set up to get these loyal Ansonians to lead them to the overclan—and then once they're on their journey, it felt really long. I also didn’t have a good sense of how long their journey took, because it is constantly going through this template of they travel, and encounter something bad, and stop for a bit, then they encounter a tribe, then they travel some more and encounter danger.
I wasn’t entirely interested in their journey, and I think part of that came down to knowing that Ansion doesn’t leave the Republic because this whole mission is just a throwaway line in Attack of the Clones. I wasn’t interested in the scheming of the Commerce Guild either, which definitely made the story slow-going at times.
I also felt like this was another book where Obi-Wan and Anakin are here solely for marketing purposes and to justify Mace Windu’s line in the film. In Obi-Wan’s case especially, we didn’t gain any insights into his character, and I didn’t feel like his character was an accurate portrayal of prequel-era Obi-Wan either. I liked getting to see Anakin’s conflict, but I would have preferred to spend more time with Luminara and Barriss rather than splitting the story between two Jedi and two padawans.
There were also some weird little errors, like Luminara and Barriss being described as humans when they are decidedly not. Mirialans are near-human, but they also have green or yellow or purple skin!
And I noticed this a little bit in the novelization of [b:Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace|819058|Star Wars, Episode I - The Phantom Menace|Terry Brooks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387710794l/819058._SY75_.jpg|3304766], but this was a technical issue here as well. Foster would jump into different characters’ heads within the same scene. At times, I think Foster was utilizing an omniscient narrator (we get interjections about the Coruscant plotters during the Jedi’s scenes), but it’s jarring here. We'll start out a scene in Barriss's head—we'll jump to Anakin for two paragraphs—and then we'll jump back to Barriss and then we'll jump to Obi-Wan and then we'll jump to Anakin and… There are scene breaks, which are probably indicated by a gap between paragraphs, but within those scenes we don’t stay in one character’s viewpoint. I wondered how necessary those head hops are; why not save Anakin’s two paragraphs for a longer section with him, instead of jamming them in the middle of Barriss’s section?
Finally, The Approaching Storm feels like an unnecessary prequel. If [b:Cloak of Deception|387506|Cloak of Deception (Star Wars)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349122895l/387506._SY75_.jpg|1016812] and [b:Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter|413045|Star Wars Darth Maul Shadow Hunter (Star Wars Darth Maul, #2)|Michael Reaves|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330827857l/413045._SY75_.jpg|1116086] showed us the events that led directly into The Phantom Menace and deepened our understanding of Palpatine’s schemes, The Approaching Storm shows us that some of the worlds within the Republic want to leave. And that’s it. Count Dooku doesn’t appear until a hologram at the very end, and all we know is that he used to be a Jedi.
While Luceno’s novel added to my understanding of Episode I, Foster’s novel doesn’t. We get the explanation behind a throwaway line in Attack of the Clones, but since the Separatists are foiled here it just doesn’t feel like an essential read.
IN CONCLUSION:
The Approaching Storm serves as a prologue to Episode II: Attack of the Clones, setting up the Separatist conflict and Anakin’s dissatisfaction with his role as a Jedi padawan. But at the same time, I really struggled with this book. I was not interested in the political intrigue, I found the Jedi plotline long and dragging at times, and it didn’t add much to my deeper understanding of anything prequel-related. (An average mission for Obi-Wan and Anakin and a nice introduction to Luminara and Barriss, but nothing more.)
Next up: R.A. Salvatore’s novelization of [b:Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones|629384|Star Wars-Episode II Attack of the Clones|R.A. Salvatore|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441320475l/629384._SY75_.jpg|558004] from 2002
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/6DTldwvvUg0
Approaching Storm interview and excerpt (January 2002): https://web.archive.org/web/20050204223713/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/f20020129/index.html
This week’s focus: an immediate prequel to Episode II: Attack of the Clones, The Approaching Storm by Alan Dean Foster.
SOME HISTORY:
Alan Dean Foster was one of the old school, pre-Bantam era Star Wars writers, having served as the ghostwriter for the novelization of [b:Star Wars: A New Hope|599090|Star Wars A New Hope (Star Wars Novelizations, #4)|George Lucas|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408936775l/599090._SY75_.jpg|123227] (the cover credits George Lucas) and then written 1978’s (very trippy) [b:Splinter of the Mind's Eye|35204|Splinter of the Mind's Eye (Star Wars)|Alan Dean Foster|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1402056438l/35204._SY75_.jpg|1107902]. His 2002 novel, The Approaching Storm, serves as a prologue to Episode II: Attack of the Clones, as the film mentions that Obi-Wan Kenobi had just returned from a border dispute on Ansion. The Approaching Storm made it to number twelve on the New York Times bestseller list for two straight weeks—from the week of February 17 to the week of February 24, 2002--and was on the list for four weeks.
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
This will probably be a common refrain with the prequel books, but while I assume that I read The Approaching Storm in 2002, I remembered nothing from it.
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
On the tiny but strategic planet of Ansion, a powerful faction is on the verge of joining the growing secessionist movement. The Jedi Council sends two Jedi Knights, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luminara Unduli, along with their Padawans Anakin Skywalker and Barriss Offee, to stabilize the planet's population. To succeed, the Jedi will have to fulfill impossible tasks, befriend wary strangers, and influence two great armies, followed all the while by an enemy sworn to see their mission fail…
THE CHARACTERS:
At its heart, The Approaching Storm is a road trip story with a heavy sprinkling of political intrigue. Our four Jedi are sent to Ansion to negotiate between the people of the cities—the Unity—and the people of the plains—the Alwari. They set off across the plains of Ansion to meet with the Alwari and get them to agree to terms with the Unity. Of course, there are people on Ansion that want to stop what the Jedi are doing, and there’s also that sprinkling of political intrigue: so we keep cutting away to the Ansionian politicians who are debating whether to secede from the Republic, and Shu Mai of the Commerce Guild and other senators and business people who are trying to influence Ansionian politics from Coruscant. The Approaching Storm serves to set up the Separatist conflict in Episode II, as we also get a sneak peak at Count Dooku at the very end.
On the road trip front, we have Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker joining Luminara Unduli and Barriss Offee on Ansion. After some initial negotiations with the city folk, they spend most of the book traveling across the plains of Ansion in search of the overclan of the Alwari. When I say that the road trip is the majority of the story, I’m not lying! There’s 97 pages of setup, and then the rest of the book is the Jedi’s journey. If you don’t like road trip stories…unfortunately, that’s the entire plot here. It is a little different from other road trip stories in that they don’t stop in towns (there are no towns) but instead encounter strange wildlife along the way. They meet four different tribes, but mostly it’s just the Jedi and their guides in pretty barren settings.
Luminara Unduli appeared very briefly in [b:Cloak of Deception|387506|Cloak of Deception (Star Wars)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349122895l/387506._SY75_.jpg|1016812], but we spend much more time with her here. She’s a good teacher, she doesn’t jump into action as Anakin is prone to do, she’s willing to listen to people, and she’s very talented. She’s athletic and flexible, and shows off her abilities in two different scenes: manipulating sand with the Force, and then retrieving some very rare wool out of a huge clump of herding beasts. She’s not a dueling master, but she’s very skilled in what she does.
We also meet her padawan, Barriss Offee. Barris has a very specific, rare skill set, and wants to be a healer. She doesn’t get along with Anakin, as she finds him reckless and impatient, so a lot of the story involves them having to learn how to work together.
There’s a lot of conflict within Anakin (setting things up for Attack of the Clones): he thinks he wants to be a great Jedi, but he doesn’t really know what he wants; he desperately wants to see his mother again; and he struggles with the Jedi’s sense of patience and calmness, because he comes most alive when he can rush into action.
And then Obi-Wan is here…of the four Jedi characters, I felt like Obi-Wan was fleshed out the least. We got Obi-Wan the dignified Jedi, but I felt like Foster was missing that essential sassy quality of Obi-Wan’s personality. It really came through with Ewan McGregor’s portrayal in the prequel films, and is lacking here—Obi-Wan’s propensity to good-naturedly snipe at anyone and everyone, but especially at Anakin.
Our heroes can’t seek out the Alwari tribes without guides, but I was not crazy about the guides here. I think it’s less the characters themselves, and more how they were portrayed within the story. Kyakhta and Bolgan are clanless Alwari, and Foster describes them as “mentally ill.” They’re hired by Soergg the Hutt to kidnap Barriss, but she recognizes there is some issue at play and heals them…and they instantly go from speaking broken English, to speaking perfect, dignified English. (I know within the constraints of the story they’re speaking Ansionian, but it’s written in English.)
I really did not like how this element of the story was addressed! 1) please do not conflate mental illness with what appears to be an intellectual disability, they are entirely different issues; 2) Bolgan’s condition seems to have been related to a childhood injury (he lost an eye and broke his back, and Barriss isn’t able to heal those old injuries) but we’re not given a story behind Kyakhta’s condition, he talked about “going mad”; 3) it felt like “the Jedi need guides, so let’s take these disabled individuals and have Barriss fix them up and they’re fine now” and I would have rather that this subplot was handled with more nuance, or just straight up dropped.
On their road trip, they also pick up another native species of Ansion: a Gwurran thief named Tooqui. He says “consider me a pet!” and Luminara says that he’s a sentient creature, not a pet, yet they still let him tag along with them? He’s there to rescue them from the Traders, but he’s an annoying companion.
I did like how Foster didn't portray the Alwari as backwards, or needing to be educated; that they want to keep their way of life, and the negotiations with the city folk were less about educating the Alwari and “bringing them up to the city folk standards,” and more what each group could learn from each other or benefit each other.
The main bad guy on Ansion is Bossban Soergg the Hut, and he tries very hard to kill the Jedi at various points—or failing that, to get them to leave Ansion. He has a native Ansonian majordomo named Ogomoor who does most of the dirty work for him. Ogomoor dies, but Soergg wiggles out untouched in the end (very Hutt-like of him).
Over on the Coruscant political intrigue front, we mostly have schemes involving Shu Mai, the president of the Commerce Guild. Shu Mai and her associates want Ansion to secede and join the Separatist movement because it’s at the center of lots of different alliances, and if Ansion left the Republic, it would hopefully spur its partners to leave as well. I did have to question how many people Shu Mai and her associates killed throughout the book: surely someone would have noticed all these suspicious deaths? But I guess the Republic is so rotting and corrupt at this point, that strange deaths go unnoticed.
ISSUES:
My biggest issue with The Approaching Storm was pace. The setup felt slow and unwieldy—Barriss being kidnapped by Kyakhti and Bolgan was so obviously set up to get these loyal Ansonians to lead them to the overclan—and then once they're on their journey, it felt really long. I also didn’t have a good sense of how long their journey took, because it is constantly going through this template of they travel, and encounter something bad, and stop for a bit, then they encounter a tribe, then they travel some more and encounter danger.
I wasn’t entirely interested in their journey, and I think part of that came down to knowing that Ansion doesn’t leave the Republic because this whole mission is just a throwaway line in Attack of the Clones. I wasn’t interested in the scheming of the Commerce Guild either, which definitely made the story slow-going at times.
I also felt like this was another book where Obi-Wan and Anakin are here solely for marketing purposes and to justify Mace Windu’s line in the film. In Obi-Wan’s case especially, we didn’t gain any insights into his character, and I didn’t feel like his character was an accurate portrayal of prequel-era Obi-Wan either. I liked getting to see Anakin’s conflict, but I would have preferred to spend more time with Luminara and Barriss rather than splitting the story between two Jedi and two padawans.
There were also some weird little errors, like Luminara and Barriss being described as humans when they are decidedly not. Mirialans are near-human, but they also have green or yellow or purple skin!
And I noticed this a little bit in the novelization of [b:Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace|819058|Star Wars, Episode I - The Phantom Menace|Terry Brooks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387710794l/819058._SY75_.jpg|3304766], but this was a technical issue here as well. Foster would jump into different characters’ heads within the same scene. At times, I think Foster was utilizing an omniscient narrator (we get interjections about the Coruscant plotters during the Jedi’s scenes), but it’s jarring here. We'll start out a scene in Barriss's head—we'll jump to Anakin for two paragraphs—and then we'll jump back to Barriss and then we'll jump to Obi-Wan and then we'll jump to Anakin and… There are scene breaks, which are probably indicated by a gap between paragraphs, but within those scenes we don’t stay in one character’s viewpoint. I wondered how necessary those head hops are; why not save Anakin’s two paragraphs for a longer section with him, instead of jamming them in the middle of Barriss’s section?
Finally, The Approaching Storm feels like an unnecessary prequel. If [b:Cloak of Deception|387506|Cloak of Deception (Star Wars)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349122895l/387506._SY75_.jpg|1016812] and [b:Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter|413045|Star Wars Darth Maul Shadow Hunter (Star Wars Darth Maul, #2)|Michael Reaves|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330827857l/413045._SY75_.jpg|1116086] showed us the events that led directly into The Phantom Menace and deepened our understanding of Palpatine’s schemes, The Approaching Storm shows us that some of the worlds within the Republic want to leave. And that’s it. Count Dooku doesn’t appear until a hologram at the very end, and all we know is that he used to be a Jedi.
While Luceno’s novel added to my understanding of Episode I, Foster’s novel doesn’t. We get the explanation behind a throwaway line in Attack of the Clones, but since the Separatists are foiled here it just doesn’t feel like an essential read.
IN CONCLUSION:
The Approaching Storm serves as a prologue to Episode II: Attack of the Clones, setting up the Separatist conflict and Anakin’s dissatisfaction with his role as a Jedi padawan. But at the same time, I really struggled with this book. I was not interested in the political intrigue, I found the Jedi plotline long and dragging at times, and it didn’t add much to my deeper understanding of anything prequel-related. (An average mission for Obi-Wan and Anakin and a nice introduction to Luminara and Barriss, but nothing more.)
Next up: R.A. Salvatore’s novelization of [b:Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones|629384|Star Wars-Episode II Attack of the Clones|R.A. Salvatore|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441320475l/629384._SY75_.jpg|558004] from 2002
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/6DTldwvvUg0
Approaching Storm interview and excerpt (January 2002): https://web.archive.org/web/20050204223713/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/f20020129/index.html