shat_gpt 's review for:

Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule

3.0

adventurous hopeful mysterious fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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 ~50 named characters. Most interesting is the villain. The others feel like sketches, many more basically just defined by their species. I can kind of forgive it since this is acting as a launching point for 30-odd books, audio dramas, and comics but some of the subsequent books will hopefully dig into character or it'll be hard to stay invested in this story. A decent plot but strange to not have any main characters at your climactic battle. Two major nitpicks: one extended action scene over the last 2/3 of the book is interspersed with all the rest of the stories in a way that defies all the laws of time. Also the idea that a ship breaking apart in hyperspace could create these enormous chunks of debris that act as asteroids in multiple star systems is pretty far fetched, even for Star Wars, but it IS a creative idea for a crisis that isn't just another super weapon and I appreciate that. Some fun action and some creative descriptions / use of the force. I'm really getting tired of this Buddhist-lite Jedi philosophy of "attachment and anger" are inherently bad and "fear is the worst emotion" drivel being taken at face value. I'm no psychologist but I'd say apathy, detachment, and despair are more problematic. Anger can spur action against injustice as long as you don't let it consume or blind you. Look no further than the movies, with Luke defeating Vader and Obi-Wan defeating Darth Maul both fueled by anger at injustice. It