Book Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Book: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (The Clone Wars #1) by Karen Traviss

Source: Library

Rating: 2 stars

Review:

You know the old saying "the book is better than the movie", that's usually true. However, in this case, the movie is much better than the book. I was disappointed with this book, the story felt a little dull and it didn't feel that exciting especially with the battle scenes. I was expecting more depth but instead all I read was a rather drawn out boring book.

Another thing I was disappointed with was that so many good parts of the movie were left out of the book, such as the scene in which Senator Amidala went to speak with Ziro the Hutt then stumbled upon Ziro's involvement with the abduction of his nephew. Another amazing scene that was removed was Ahsoka's intense fight against Dooku's MagnaGuards on her way to return Jabba's son to him. Both of those scenes added to the ending and without them it felt rather disjointed.

I felt like the author didn't really understand the characters she was writing about. Most of them felt out of character. The author's voice and characterizations for these characters didn't match up to what we were shown. I find it unbelievable that Asajj Ventress would care that a spy droid she was using had been destroyed. Even R2-D2 was out of character and I find that hard to believe that anyone could mess up R2. I also didn't find Anakin and Ahsoka's characterizations that interesting either. I will admit I did find some of Anakin's internal monologue interesting you got to see some of his turmoil about the war, his feeling about his wife and his slaughter of the Tusken Raiders.

The characterizations that I did like were Chancellor Palpatine and Captain Rex and the soldiers. With the Chancellor you got to read his internal monologue as he gloated over his superiority towards the Jedi. Now with the Captain and the soldiers we got to see how the soldiers were dealing with the war and how they felt in general. It was nice reading more about them.

Something else I found really annoying throughout this book was the constant anti-Jedi/anti-republic sentiment. There was just too much of it. She has written this story as if all the Jedi were evil and corrupt without showing otherwise. She doesn't do a good job of showing a balance between the Republic/Separatist views.

Reading this made me want to rewatch the animated movie again just to wipe this horrible version from my brain. I'm really glad I checked this out from the library instead of buying it, because I would have wanted my money back.