A review by librareee
Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly

adventurous medium-paced

2.5

This is not my favorite legends novel. The spirit of the characters is intact but the story lacks a true antagonist with the death of Palpatine, Thrawn, and the emperor's clone. The X-Wing novels don't struggle with this as much because it's easy to have an Imperial Warlord play the part of such an antagonist. It feels like novels with Han, Leia, and Luke as main characters demands something more and that makes it difficult on the author I think.

This also marks the first appearance of Callista, a Jedi who was killed on the ship "The Eye of Palpatine" 30 years ago who somehow was able to transport her consciousness into the ship. There are just a lot of characters suddenly thrust into this book and the way they're portrayed makes it seem like they're people you should have already known about in other stories. I had to check Wookiepedia to make sure I hadn't missed a book in my Legends re-read that would have helped with context.

Anyways, the ability to transfer human consciousness into computers and the ability to transfer them out again is a focal point in this book. I like when Star Wars gets weird but this seemed a bit out of left field even for me. The romance between Luke and Callista was also set to, forgive me, lightspeed and developed way too fast in my opinion. It made their relationship difficult for me to buy into.

 

Anyways, this is the first in a trilogy although each book is by a different author. I'm interested to see how the characters develop as the story continues.