What? This is just bizarre
April 2010
A review of Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor
Having read a number of reviews, this book appears to be the marmite of the Star Wars universe; you either love it or hate it. Personally I thought it was absolute garbage.Firstly I’m not a fan of Matthew Stover. I found his other books very hard going and sometimes difficult to follow so even before I picked this book up I was dubious. Then we come to the title. “Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor” sounds more suited to a Flash Gordon comic, which I think is sort of what Stover was going for.
Anyway, the book itself was poorly written in my opinion. Stover seemed to be trying too hard to be funny, which inevitably has the opposite effect. He overdid the similes, most of which made no sense whatsoever. There was page after page of no dialogue that caused me to lose the will to live on several occasions and made the story very hard to follow and visualise what was going on. Then we come to the plot… if it can be described as that. I’m convinced Stover must have been smoking something dodgy when he came up with the story line or he was just making it up as he went along. I found myself screaming “what?” several times whilst reading. Oh and please, this is not a young reader’s novel. We don’t need the actual dialogue from R2-D2 and Chewbacca!
So was there anything good about this book? Well it was good to go back to this point in the timeline and read about all the original characters, especially now with the ability to place the odd reference to the prequels to add a bit more continuity to the EU series. Also, I’ll admit that Stover has a fantastically vivid imagination and a very poetic writing style. It’s not for me but then again neither is marmite.
