hstapp's review against another edition
3.0
It's been a while since I started this series, but now that I'm continuing it I am enjoying it. This book is pivotal in the series for many reasons and I ca't wait to see what will happen next.
tarmstrong112's review against another edition
5.0
I was a bit nervous going into this book. It's easily the longest Star Wars book I've ever read, and having been reading through the very uneven New Jedi Order series, I worried this would be a dull journey. I was so wrong.
I thought this book was incredible. Maybe I am judging it against the previous novels in the NJO, most of which have been only okay, but I really connected with this story. Stuff actually happens! It's quite a dark story, our characters have hopefully hit rock bottom, but I am intrigued to see where the story goes.
This is the first Star Wars book I've read written by Troy Denning and I am impressed. He has written many more books that I intend to read so I am looking forward to those as I enjoyed his writing (at least in this novel).
I thought this book was incredible. Maybe I am judging it against the previous novels in the NJO, most of which have been only okay, but I really connected with this story. Stuff actually happens! It's quite a dark story, our characters have hopefully hit rock bottom, but I am intrigued to see where the story goes.
This is the first Star Wars book I've read written by Troy Denning and I am impressed. He has written many more books that I intend to read so I am looking forward to those as I enjoyed his writing (at least in this novel).
yak_attak's review against another edition
2.0
(tl;dr: 2/5 as a whole only. parts are 5/5 the best in the series! But it doesn't come together as a whole at all)
Review/thoughts on Twitter
https://twitter.com/serswjm/status/1232699013851418624?s=20
(Spoilers)
Review/thoughts on Twitter
https://twitter.com/serswjm/status/1232699013851418624?s=20
(Spoilers)
lustrs's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
sad
tense
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? It's complicated
4.0
skywalker07's review against another edition
5.0
I love this book, it's truly so tragic. The loss of Anakin, the fall of Coruscant, and Borsk blowing himself up and taking 25k Yuuzhan Vong with him. It's so great, but man it's long and brutal.
supitslois's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
jadsia's review against another edition
5.0
I love Troy Denning as an author. I hated some of the events, loved others but death comes to everyone. Thank you for respecting the character and making it a good one.
blancwene's review against another edition
2.0
2 stars solely because I didn't enjoy reading Star by Star and felt uncomfortable with the excessive degree of torture and pain & suffering...
For 2021, I decided to reread Del Rey’s first attempt at a multi-author book series in the Star Wars universe: The New Jedi Order, which was published between 1999 and 2003. This shakes out to 19 novels, two eBook novellas, three short stories, and a tangentially-related prequel era novel.
This week’s focus: the third hardcover release in the New Jedi Order series, Star by Star by Troy Denning.
SOME HISTORY:
Troy Denning had written some Star Wars material for West End Games in the late 1980s—two “choose your own adventure” stories and the Star Wars Roleplaying Game supplement [b:Galaxy Guide 4: Alien Races|2414629|Galaxy Guide 4 Alien Races (Star Wars Roleplaying Game Supplement)|Troy Denning|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266803741l/2414629._SX50_.jpg|349892]—but like R.A. Salvatore, he was perhaps better known for his novels set within various Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Star by Star made it to number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of November 16, 2001.
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
I was a little nervous about rereading Star by Star, because I’m not sure whether it’s worse to read it completely unprepared for all the pain and suffering that will follow, as I did in 2001, or with a vague foreshadowing of every tragic event that occurs. I remembered most of the Jedi strike team’s subplot, but less of other events.
PRINCESS LEIA COSTUME COUNT:
The Jedi strike team wear snazzy brown hooded jumpsuits with reinforced armor bits--although that doesn’t seem to prevent them from being repeatedly wounded.
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
The Yuuzhan Vong have unleashed the voxyn, a savage creature capable of finding and killing Jedi Knights. And now the Jedi face a terrible ultimatum: if the location of their secret base is not revealed within one week, the Yuuzhan Vong will destroy millions of refugees. So Anakin Solo lays out a daring plan. A Jedi strike force will allow itself to be captured by the Yuuzhan Vong and taken to Myrkr, where the Jedi will destroy the voxyn queen. But can they fight a ruthless enemy without falling victim to the dark side?
THE CHARACTERS:
It’s easy to forget that Star by Star isn’t solely about the young Jedi strike team--the abridged audiobook almost entirely focuses on Anakin and co--but there are other subplots. Han and Leia are aiding the Jedi resistance. Luke Skywalker finally takes action. Danni Quee reenters the story, teaming up with Saba Sebatyne’s Wild Knightz to try to capture and counter yammosks. Borsk Fey’lya finally takes a side, while Viqi Shesh continues her traitorous scheming. And on the Yuuzhan Vong front, Warmaster Tsavong Lah begins his push against the New Republic capital of Coruscant while Nom Anor and Vergere must work together to capture the Solo twins.
Leia comes to the realization that she doesn’t want to be involved in politics anymore, and that the Force is calling her to another path. After being reunited with his family, Han feels a little nervous about losing them, so he's initially unwilling to take risks until Leia pushes back against that. A lot of their plot line involves them scouting for the Jedi and the New Republic military--and then an extended (sometimes silly) subplot in which Luke and Mara give them their infant son for safekeeping, only for Han and Leia to lose Ben during the evacuation of Coruscant. I wasn't crazy about this part; it felt like an unnecessary addition to all the traumatic events going on with the fall of Coruscant.
Luke finally takes a stand! He decides that the Jedi should take action, and so a lot of his plot line involves Luke and Mara forming their own x-wing squadron. They’re very successful at first, but as with the fall of Coruscant, they lose a lot of people in the end. All the different squadrons use codenames; Luke’s is “Farmboy,” but Mara’s is “Mother”... Look, I understand she just had a baby, but you can give her a better codename than that!
Danni Quee reappears, after not really being seen since the Dark Tide duology. (I would be interested to know what Michael Jan Friedman’s trilogy would have entailed, because we learned here that she’s been training in the Force for the past two years.) She accompanies Saba Sebatyne and the Wild Knightz in an attempt to capture a yammosk--the Yuuzhan Vong brain strategy thing--and then learn how to counteract it. Cilghal and Danni create the blocker offscreen, and I wish we could have seen more of her work.
On the political side, we have Borsk Fey’lya finally siding with the Jedi. Borsk has been all over the place in the series thus far; he dithered and played both sides for so long that it was satisfying to see him actually do something (even if it is a suicide bomb). And Viqi Shesh really falls apart in Star by Star--she went from being this secret traitor working for the Vong to someone unduly manipulated by them. She tries to assassinate Borsk Fey’lya, then makes multiple attempts to capture Ben Skywalker. I'm not sure she would be willing to take that much public action, especially when she thinks that the fall of Coruscant would culminate in her being placed in a position of power. She goes downhill very fast.
Tsavong Lah begins his big push against the Core, capturing Reecee and Borleias before moving on to Coruscant. The Vong capture Coruscant, mainly because the strategy involves overwhelming force and doesn’t care about loss of their own vessels. (Very unlike our heroes!) Nom Anor and Vergere are both separately scheming, and are dispatched to Myrkr to capture the Solo twins--twins have great prominence within Yuuzhan Vong mythology. Nom Anor’s plan is clear, but Vergere’s motives are much less so…
There are other things happening in the book to justify its very long length, but the Jedi strike team subplot is the most pivotal and central. Ganner Rhysode is the decoy leader, but Anakin Solo is the actual strategic lead. The team is composed of volunteers--people had to choose to go--but I did question the presence of every single Solo child on this strike team. While I understand that the voxyn are a huge threat, and Jaina and Jacen and Anakin would all want to volunteer for this task, I wish there had been a little more pushback against all of them being involved--because you run the very great risk of Han and Leia losing all their children on the same (reckless) mission.
Briefly: the strike team plans for a fake traitor (Lando) to hand them over to the Vong. They then commandeer the vessel (The Exquisite Death) and head to Myrkr to destroy the voxyn queen, since Cilghal learned that all the voxyn are clones of the only viable specimen. They arrive and lose the first member of their team (Ulaha Kore); Anakin senses the presence of other Jedi, but they discover that they’re Dark Jedi. They keep trying to reach the cloning facilities but it's like a maze. They lose more members of the strike team (Jovan Drark and Eryl Besa and Bela & Krasov Hara); they’re betrayed by the Dark Jedi who abscond with Raynar Thul.
And after the Edge of Victory duology, where Anakin struggled with toning down his recklessness and thinking about the example he presents to other Jedi, he behaves in a very reckless manner: he tries to rescue his sister from Vong ambush and is grievously wounded. He’s unwilling to slow down--he’s unwilling to stop and heal--so as the story progresses he grows weaker and weaker. The team finally make a play against the voxyn queen, but it fails. Anakin gives himself up to the Force to help the others escape--he's full of light, his cells are breaking down--and he's able to destroy the voxyn genetic material but at the cost of his own life.
With Anakin’s death, the strike team falls apart into two factions. Jaina gives herself over to her anger and grief, retrieves Anakin's body from the Vong, crashes the shuttle she’d stolen, but in the end escapes with everyone except for Jacen. Meanwhile, Jacen tries to finish the mission (as Anakin requested) so he tracks down the voxyn queen. He successfully takes her out, but he’s also captured by Vergere and his fate is left up in the air.
Part of what I found so sad about Star by Star was how dysfunctional the relationship between the three Solo siblings appeared. Anakin doesn't want Jacen to be part of the team; he thinks that Jacen’s different ideas will lead to division within the group. Jacen comes along anyway as the facilitator of the Jedi mind meld, but as tensions rise he finds it harder to keep everyone connected. Jacen incorrectly believes that Anakin ordered Ulaha to resist torture; Anakin regrets bringing Jacen along on the mission; Jacen is barely given an opportunity to apologize for his mistake. I think what upsets me the most is that Anakin dies, and I never got the sense that the Solo siblings were able to work through their conflicts beforehand. (I guess that’s true to life, but it’s excessively depressing.)
The Jedi strike team is half composed of the usual lot (the Solo kids, Ganner Rhysode, and characters from the Young Jedi Knights books), but also a number of new characters. I think this led to the same problem I had with Stackpole’s X-Wing books, where characters die to illustrate how *~*dangerous*~* the situation is; but other than the first death (Ulaha) and Anakin, I didn’t know much about these Jedi characters so they felt like expendable crewmen.
ISSUES:
Star by Star accomplishes a lot. But I have trouble talking about my issues with it, mainly because I don't think that they’re issues with the book in a technical sense but more things that I don't feel comfortable reading. This obviously made me reluctant to reread it twenty years later! For instance, the excessive use of torture: when the Jedi strike team is captured by the Yuuzhan Vong, Commander Duman Yaght wants to uncover the location of the secret Jedi base...so there’s a lot of torture. I don't like reading torture scenes; I didn't like it in [b:Balance Point|320346|Balance Point (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #6)|Kathy Tyers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330833461l/320346._SY75_.jpg|311099], I didn't like it any of the other books, and it's really uncomfortable for me to read. While I know why it's there--it sets the stakes of everything that's to come--I didn't like revisiting it. It made me upset to see how these young Jedi start to break and almost turn against each other.
I also questioned the sense of time here: [b:Balance Point|320346|Balance Point (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #6)|Kathy Tyers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330833461l/320346._SY75_.jpg|311099] and the Edge of Victory duology were supposed to take place 26 years after the Battle of Yavin (within the span of one year), and then Star by Star takes us to the next year of the war, 27 years after the Battle of Yavin. Yet the Yuuzhan Vong don’t learn about vornskrs until [b:Edge of Victory I: Conquest|320347|Edge of Victory I Conquest (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #7)|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403184941l/320347._SY75_.jpg|1776613], and I’m not sure how much time has elapsed between Conquest and [b:Edge of Victory II: Rebirth|35429|Edge of Victory II Rebirth (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #8)|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187398l/35429._SY75_.jpg|72183] and now Star by Star. The voxyn cloning facility and the worldship feel too entrenched for the amount of time that has actually elapsed. The Yuuzhan Vong created different, unique environments to train the voxyn--but we also know that they had great difficulties in creating them, as evidenced by the fact that the only viable specimen was the voxyn queen. It seems like a lot of work went into this but the timeline doesn’t mesh with that.
A related problem with the voxyn: we see one Jedi's death in the very beginning (Numa Rar), but the ones that follow (Lusa and Eelysa and Lyric) happen completely offscreen. I wish we could have seen some more of those deaths, to drive home the huge threat of the voxyn and why the Jedi need to tackle this impossible task. Because as it stands, I wanted to side with some of the other Jedi--the voxyn are obviously dangerous, but they didn't feel as developed as I would have wanted them to be.
Finally, I found the action scenes were difficult to follow--which is a little hard when so much of the book is devoted to action sequences! I think this worked very well for the strike team scenes on the worldship, because it's disorienting. It has a very dream-like vibe which I think works well with the mission, and works well with the amount of fatigue that the Jedi were operating under. It almost gives a sense of unreality to everything that's happening above Myrkr, because I'm not sure how long they've been there and exactly what their routes have entailed. It just gets murky.
With the other characters, I feel like those disorienting battle scenes are much more of a detriment. It's hard for me to follow what's happening in the battles, and I should be able to follow what happens! The battle for Coruscant is confusing, and there's lots of things happening--so the emotion is right, but I feel like there should be more clarity there.
IN CONCLUSION:
Star by Star is a very emotional read. More than any of the other NJO books thus far, this is a war story, and it has the coinciding losses. The tides of war in the Yuuzhan Vong Invasion have tipped over to the Vong’s favor: Coruscant is fallen, the New Republic government is in pieces, the secret Jedi base on Eclipse has been breached, and the Jedi have lost countless members, including Anakin Solo.
While I’m glad I got to read Star by Star for this reread, and there were some parts that I thought were well done, the novel is too dark and grim and depressing for me. Fortunately I have it behind me, so I can move forward to the rest of the series and a more hopeful outcome for our heroes.
Next up: a Jaina-centric novel--[b:Dark Journey|266782|Dark Journey (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #10)|Elaine Cunningham|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347318991l/266782._SY75_.jpg|522983] by Elaine Cunningham.
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/BveMK1KiVbI
Interview with Troy Denning circa 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20050308005716/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/f20011113/index.html
For 2021, I decided to reread Del Rey’s first attempt at a multi-author book series in the Star Wars universe: The New Jedi Order, which was published between 1999 and 2003. This shakes out to 19 novels, two eBook novellas, three short stories, and a tangentially-related prequel era novel.
This week’s focus: the third hardcover release in the New Jedi Order series, Star by Star by Troy Denning.
SOME HISTORY:
Troy Denning had written some Star Wars material for West End Games in the late 1980s—two “choose your own adventure” stories and the Star Wars Roleplaying Game supplement [b:Galaxy Guide 4: Alien Races|2414629|Galaxy Guide 4 Alien Races (Star Wars Roleplaying Game Supplement)|Troy Denning|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266803741l/2414629._SX50_.jpg|349892]—but like R.A. Salvatore, he was perhaps better known for his novels set within various Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Star by Star made it to number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of November 16, 2001.
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
I was a little nervous about rereading Star by Star, because I’m not sure whether it’s worse to read it completely unprepared for all the pain and suffering that will follow, as I did in 2001, or with a vague foreshadowing of every tragic event that occurs. I remembered most of the Jedi strike team’s subplot, but less of other events.
PRINCESS LEIA COSTUME COUNT:
The Jedi strike team wear snazzy brown hooded jumpsuits with reinforced armor bits--although that doesn’t seem to prevent them from being repeatedly wounded.
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
The Yuuzhan Vong have unleashed the voxyn, a savage creature capable of finding and killing Jedi Knights. And now the Jedi face a terrible ultimatum: if the location of their secret base is not revealed within one week, the Yuuzhan Vong will destroy millions of refugees. So Anakin Solo lays out a daring plan. A Jedi strike force will allow itself to be captured by the Yuuzhan Vong and taken to Myrkr, where the Jedi will destroy the voxyn queen. But can they fight a ruthless enemy without falling victim to the dark side?
THE CHARACTERS:
It’s easy to forget that Star by Star isn’t solely about the young Jedi strike team--the abridged audiobook almost entirely focuses on Anakin and co--but there are other subplots. Han and Leia are aiding the Jedi resistance. Luke Skywalker finally takes action. Danni Quee reenters the story, teaming up with Saba Sebatyne’s Wild Knightz to try to capture and counter yammosks. Borsk Fey’lya finally takes a side, while Viqi Shesh continues her traitorous scheming. And on the Yuuzhan Vong front, Warmaster Tsavong Lah begins his push against the New Republic capital of Coruscant while Nom Anor and Vergere must work together to capture the Solo twins.
Leia comes to the realization that she doesn’t want to be involved in politics anymore, and that the Force is calling her to another path. After being reunited with his family, Han feels a little nervous about losing them, so he's initially unwilling to take risks until Leia pushes back against that. A lot of their plot line involves them scouting for the Jedi and the New Republic military--and then an extended (sometimes silly) subplot in which Luke and Mara give them their infant son for safekeeping, only for Han and Leia to lose Ben during the evacuation of Coruscant. I wasn't crazy about this part; it felt like an unnecessary addition to all the traumatic events going on with the fall of Coruscant.
Luke finally takes a stand! He decides that the Jedi should take action, and so a lot of his plot line involves Luke and Mara forming their own x-wing squadron. They’re very successful at first, but as with the fall of Coruscant, they lose a lot of people in the end. All the different squadrons use codenames; Luke’s is “Farmboy,” but Mara’s is “Mother”... Look, I understand she just had a baby, but you can give her a better codename than that!
Danni Quee reappears, after not really being seen since the Dark Tide duology. (I would be interested to know what Michael Jan Friedman’s trilogy would have entailed, because we learned here that she’s been training in the Force for the past two years.) She accompanies Saba Sebatyne and the Wild Knightz in an attempt to capture a yammosk--the Yuuzhan Vong brain strategy thing--and then learn how to counteract it. Cilghal and Danni create the blocker offscreen, and I wish we could have seen more of her work.
On the political side, we have Borsk Fey’lya finally siding with the Jedi. Borsk has been all over the place in the series thus far; he dithered and played both sides for so long that it was satisfying to see him actually do something (even if it is a suicide bomb). And Viqi Shesh really falls apart in Star by Star--she went from being this secret traitor working for the Vong to someone unduly manipulated by them. She tries to assassinate Borsk Fey’lya, then makes multiple attempts to capture Ben Skywalker. I'm not sure she would be willing to take that much public action, especially when she thinks that the fall of Coruscant would culminate in her being placed in a position of power. She goes downhill very fast.
Tsavong Lah begins his big push against the Core, capturing Reecee and Borleias before moving on to Coruscant. The Vong capture Coruscant, mainly because the strategy involves overwhelming force and doesn’t care about loss of their own vessels. (Very unlike our heroes!) Nom Anor and Vergere are both separately scheming, and are dispatched to Myrkr to capture the Solo twins--twins have great prominence within Yuuzhan Vong mythology. Nom Anor’s plan is clear, but Vergere’s motives are much less so…
There are other things happening in the book to justify its very long length, but the Jedi strike team subplot is the most pivotal and central. Ganner Rhysode is the decoy leader, but Anakin Solo is the actual strategic lead. The team is composed of volunteers--people had to choose to go--but I did question the presence of every single Solo child on this strike team. While I understand that the voxyn are a huge threat, and Jaina and Jacen and Anakin would all want to volunteer for this task, I wish there had been a little more pushback against all of them being involved--because you run the very great risk of Han and Leia losing all their children on the same (reckless) mission.
Briefly: the strike team plans for a fake traitor (Lando) to hand them over to the Vong. They then commandeer the vessel (The Exquisite Death) and head to Myrkr to destroy the voxyn queen, since Cilghal learned that all the voxyn are clones of the only viable specimen. They arrive and lose the first member of their team (Ulaha Kore); Anakin senses the presence of other Jedi, but they discover that they’re Dark Jedi. They keep trying to reach the cloning facilities but it's like a maze. They lose more members of the strike team (Jovan Drark and Eryl Besa and Bela & Krasov Hara); they’re betrayed by the Dark Jedi who abscond with Raynar Thul.
And after the Edge of Victory duology, where Anakin struggled with toning down his recklessness and thinking about the example he presents to other Jedi, he behaves in a very reckless manner: he tries to rescue his sister from Vong ambush and is grievously wounded. He’s unwilling to slow down--he’s unwilling to stop and heal--so as the story progresses he grows weaker and weaker. The team finally make a play against the voxyn queen, but it fails. Anakin gives himself up to the Force to help the others escape--he's full of light, his cells are breaking down--and he's able to destroy the voxyn genetic material but at the cost of his own life.
With Anakin’s death, the strike team falls apart into two factions. Jaina gives herself over to her anger and grief, retrieves Anakin's body from the Vong, crashes the shuttle she’d stolen, but in the end escapes with everyone except for Jacen. Meanwhile, Jacen tries to finish the mission (as Anakin requested) so he tracks down the voxyn queen. He successfully takes her out, but he’s also captured by Vergere and his fate is left up in the air.
Part of what I found so sad about Star by Star was how dysfunctional the relationship between the three Solo siblings appeared. Anakin doesn't want Jacen to be part of the team; he thinks that Jacen’s different ideas will lead to division within the group. Jacen comes along anyway as the facilitator of the Jedi mind meld, but as tensions rise he finds it harder to keep everyone connected. Jacen incorrectly believes that Anakin ordered Ulaha to resist torture; Anakin regrets bringing Jacen along on the mission; Jacen is barely given an opportunity to apologize for his mistake. I think what upsets me the most is that Anakin dies, and I never got the sense that the Solo siblings were able to work through their conflicts beforehand. (I guess that’s true to life, but it’s excessively depressing.)
The Jedi strike team is half composed of the usual lot (the Solo kids, Ganner Rhysode, and characters from the Young Jedi Knights books), but also a number of new characters. I think this led to the same problem I had with Stackpole’s X-Wing books, where characters die to illustrate how *~*dangerous*~* the situation is; but other than the first death (Ulaha) and Anakin, I didn’t know much about these Jedi characters so they felt like expendable crewmen.
ISSUES:
Star by Star accomplishes a lot. But I have trouble talking about my issues with it, mainly because I don't think that they’re issues with the book in a technical sense but more things that I don't feel comfortable reading. This obviously made me reluctant to reread it twenty years later! For instance, the excessive use of torture: when the Jedi strike team is captured by the Yuuzhan Vong, Commander Duman Yaght wants to uncover the location of the secret Jedi base...so there’s a lot of torture. I don't like reading torture scenes; I didn't like it in [b:Balance Point|320346|Balance Point (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #6)|Kathy Tyers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330833461l/320346._SY75_.jpg|311099], I didn't like it any of the other books, and it's really uncomfortable for me to read. While I know why it's there--it sets the stakes of everything that's to come--I didn't like revisiting it. It made me upset to see how these young Jedi start to break and almost turn against each other.
I also questioned the sense of time here: [b:Balance Point|320346|Balance Point (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #6)|Kathy Tyers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330833461l/320346._SY75_.jpg|311099] and the Edge of Victory duology were supposed to take place 26 years after the Battle of Yavin (within the span of one year), and then Star by Star takes us to the next year of the war, 27 years after the Battle of Yavin. Yet the Yuuzhan Vong don’t learn about vornskrs until [b:Edge of Victory I: Conquest|320347|Edge of Victory I Conquest (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #7)|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403184941l/320347._SY75_.jpg|1776613], and I’m not sure how much time has elapsed between Conquest and [b:Edge of Victory II: Rebirth|35429|Edge of Victory II Rebirth (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #8)|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187398l/35429._SY75_.jpg|72183] and now Star by Star. The voxyn cloning facility and the worldship feel too entrenched for the amount of time that has actually elapsed. The Yuuzhan Vong created different, unique environments to train the voxyn--but we also know that they had great difficulties in creating them, as evidenced by the fact that the only viable specimen was the voxyn queen. It seems like a lot of work went into this but the timeline doesn’t mesh with that.
A related problem with the voxyn: we see one Jedi's death in the very beginning (Numa Rar), but the ones that follow (Lusa and Eelysa and Lyric) happen completely offscreen. I wish we could have seen some more of those deaths, to drive home the huge threat of the voxyn and why the Jedi need to tackle this impossible task. Because as it stands, I wanted to side with some of the other Jedi--the voxyn are obviously dangerous, but they didn't feel as developed as I would have wanted them to be.
Finally, I found the action scenes were difficult to follow--which is a little hard when so much of the book is devoted to action sequences! I think this worked very well for the strike team scenes on the worldship, because it's disorienting. It has a very dream-like vibe which I think works well with the mission, and works well with the amount of fatigue that the Jedi were operating under. It almost gives a sense of unreality to everything that's happening above Myrkr, because I'm not sure how long they've been there and exactly what their routes have entailed. It just gets murky.
With the other characters, I feel like those disorienting battle scenes are much more of a detriment. It's hard for me to follow what's happening in the battles, and I should be able to follow what happens! The battle for Coruscant is confusing, and there's lots of things happening--so the emotion is right, but I feel like there should be more clarity there.
IN CONCLUSION:
Star by Star is a very emotional read. More than any of the other NJO books thus far, this is a war story, and it has the coinciding losses. The tides of war in the Yuuzhan Vong Invasion have tipped over to the Vong’s favor: Coruscant is fallen, the New Republic government is in pieces, the secret Jedi base on Eclipse has been breached, and the Jedi have lost countless members, including Anakin Solo.
While I’m glad I got to read Star by Star for this reread, and there were some parts that I thought were well done, the novel is too dark and grim and depressing for me. Fortunately I have it behind me, so I can move forward to the rest of the series and a more hopeful outcome for our heroes.
Next up: a Jaina-centric novel--[b:Dark Journey|266782|Dark Journey (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #10)|Elaine Cunningham|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347318991l/266782._SY75_.jpg|522983] by Elaine Cunningham.
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/BveMK1KiVbI
Interview with Troy Denning circa 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20050308005716/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/f20011113/index.html
alphaalexis's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25