Review: Heir to the Jedi

Heir to the Jedi by Kevin Hearne
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is one of the worst Star Wars-branded books I've ever read (and I read the Lando Calrissian trilogy, along with the vast majority of SW books in existence). I don't even know where to start. As another reviewer has mentioned, I was initially put off by how large the typeface was - it made me feel like this book was written for the 12-16 age group, and what I read really just confirmed that impression.

1) The idea of a first-person book narrated by Luke Skywalker is fantastic. Get inside the head of the character everyone loves, see what motivates him and drives him, change up the typical format for Star Wars novels and how that the new EU is gonna be different. But it fails so, so hard. First-person narration gives a lot of opportunity for characterization, but it also demands an actual character that has a particular perspective and doesn't automatically know everything. This book felt like it was originally in third person and then they changed all of the instances of "Luke" to "I." When the author DOES try for characterization, Luke ends up being a clueless caricature of ANH!Luke and also using the word "awkward" six times a page. HEY I'M SO AWKWARD WITH GIRLS. I WISH I WAS LESS AWKWARD. WOW IT TURNS OUT THIS GIRL MIGHT BE INTO MY AWKWARDNESS?? Luke sounds like a 14-year-old boy who's never spoken to a girl before. Part of this may be due to how naive Luke is in ANH, and how bland he tends to be as a character in general, but I'd definitely blame the execution over the source material in this case (because I actually LIKE Luke in the original trilogy). There's just no subtlety in any of the characterization or dialogue (when Luke meets Nakari, he almost literally says 'Wow, we're both from desert planets and we both like ships. She understands that I like ships because ships take you away from desert planets').

(There were also some weird places where it changed tense. Things like starting a sentence with "I think" or "I believe" and then commenting on what's happening in the plot, with the rest of the sentence in past tense. Like, what? I guess Luke is telling the story to us at some point in the future? Even though that's not explicitly stated or even implied anywhere except in those weird, out-of-place sentences?)

2) The pacing was terrible, from the arc of the novel as a whole to individual scenes. The story arc felt more like a video game than a novel - Luke starts with small missions, basically gaining XP, a party, and weapons upgrades before going off on the main quest. Every time he leaves the Alliance base, Leia runs after him and tells him something he needs to know right before he leaves (why didn't she tell him in the briefing, which was the previous scene, if this is so vital to the mission??). There is literally no time unaccounted for from the start of the novel to the end and there are almost no scene transitions; Luke will finish up doing an activity, then describe how he spent the next six hours in one sentence, and then do another activity while still in the same paragraph. It was really disjointed and jolting, and could've been solved by a simple break in the page.

Individual scenes also felt mis-ordered. When Nakari's father is introduced, Luke has one of his present-tense moments and says that he's not sure whether he made a good impression on Nakari's father, and then tells the reader that Nakari's father likes to yell at his employees and calls them minions, but always ends the request with a softer, kinder aside. And then we meet Nakari's father and he does just that. Why did we need Luke to explain to us a character trait that evidenced was right there, two paragraphs down? Why did we need him to talk about the impression he left BEFORE the scene where he meets the guy?

3) There was a lot of unnecessary explanation that didn't read well at all. I read a lot of sci-fi and I'm very familiar with the infodump and how clunky it can be - but most infodumps actually flesh out the world and make it interesting. Luke's occasional attempts to understand the Force were dull reiterations of knowledge the reader already knows (maybe an attempt to re-canonize certain aspects of the Force, I guess?), and there was a lot of time spent explaining why Luke knows things that are going on in other places that he shouldn't know (because this book doesn't understand how first person narration works, but it knows that it's not doing it right).

4) The other characters were either boring or paper-thin, with one characteristic that was hammered into you. Nakari was a pretty-female-sniper version of Luke, didn't have any flaws, and liked to state as obviously as possible that she likes how awkward Luke is (because at this point, the book is obviously directed at awkward teenage boys who just want pretty, not-awkward girls to tell them they're cute), and really made Luke unnecessary. The mission was originally a one-person mission, and she had a great ship, was a great pilot, and was a much better shot than Luke, and he asks her to come along to help, and then she basically stands there and lets Luke do almost everything. Dursil, the Givin woman they rescue, comes from a species that likes math a lot, so obviously, she doesn't understand subtleties of emotion and all of her dialogue and actions involve liking math. She reminded me a lot of Sheldon, from The Big Bang Theory, possibly one of the most tired and unfriendly portrayals of nerds in existence. Nakari's dad had his one thing, mentioned earlier. (They also forced in an anachronistic joke about "foiling" an equation that the characters found a lot funnier than the reader did.) And even Luke was just awkward, with little other characterization.

And last, but possibly the worst (major spoiler alert):

4) The main female character lasts long enough to encourage Luke to actually use the Force, and then dies, which finally allows Luke to grieve. FUCK THAT SHIT. Luke had ENOUGH love interests die in various (much more interesting) ways in the old EU. I am goddamn tired of introducing females as love interests only to kill them off when the main male character has gotten all the character development he can suck out of them. It's boring, it's misogynistic, and it's incredibly frustrating. She literally dies at the end of the mission, after she's done everything she can to help Luke finish the mission (which is really very little, since this book is just about how awesome Luke is), and her death only serves to help Luke process all of his repressed feelings of loss cf. Uncle Owen/Aunt Beru/Biggs Darklighter.

There were a few good things - once the action got rolling, I could get immersed for at least a few pages before some stilted dialogue or strange pacing or really unsubtle attempt at characterization distracted me. I really liked the idea of the Givin (though not the execution), and several alien species were interesting too. There were also a couple of funny moments.

To sum up: I think this book should not have been geared toward an adult audience. The bland characterization, the completely unsubtle nature of all the dialogue and plot, and the emphasis on Luke's awkwardness and his infatuation with Nakari make it a much better fit for younger readers. However, the lack of any voice or perspective in a first-person story, the uneven and sometimes confusing pacing, the lack of interesting/developed characters, and the existence/fridging of the main female character solely to serve the main male character's development really make it unsuitable for ANY audience.

Edit: I also feel incredibly ripped off, because one of the last (sort-of) trilogies published in the old EU started with Razor's Edge (featuring Leia) and Honor Among Thieves (ft. Han) and was presumably going to end with a Luke centric book (with a suspiciously similar plot), and the first two were definitely in my top 10 SW books. To have the old EU end when it was going in such a positive direction and to start the new one with this and Tarkin... such a bummer.

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