Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse

This was rubbish honestly.

I don't take any pleasure in being negative, the opposite in fact, and my negative opinions here are not purely because of how good the last book was, but this novel was pretty atrocious in my opinion.

The book decides to spend almost all of its time focusing on none of the main characters of not just the original trilogy, but of the New Jedi Order novels either.

For example, Han is relegated to about two chapters for the first two hundred pages, before getting a little bit of action towards the end, with Leia getting a big focus of almost exclusively diplomatic dialogue every now and then, Mara does not appear, and Luke is in a total of two chapters in where he tells a few people what to do and talks to Talon Karrde.

I was excited to see Karrde again by the way, what a disappointment! He did fuck all.

The craziest part might be how explosive an opener this novel had. Leia has to brutally pick between who to save in the midst of an absolutely insane battle, with the Yuuzhan Vong basically deploying their variation of a dragon, and an entire planet being decimated with many, many innocents being lost.

And then the book descends into almost pure dialogue for two hundred pages. I am not exaggerating. I cannot think of anything until around the 250 page mark that can be argued as an “action sequence.” I'm not really gonna count a small duel between two people either. It lasts like three pages.

Anakin and Jacen's development from their arguing in ‘Vector Prime' to the camaraderie they've regained has just gone. They are back to arguing the same old points again and any semblance of brotherly love has seemed to have just disappeared. They are both so flat here.

Poor Jaina is in like one page. She is mentioned and doesn't do or even (if I remember correctly) say anything!

It seems like Luceno was determined to write an entire novel without any semblance of an actual story, and to focus what elements of a plot there was on the most uninteresting characters possible, and to end it with a big ship fight of all things!

The tragedy that happens towards the end was not a surprise to me at all, and it seemed like we could expect it from the moment Centerpoint was even mentioned. It was really played up too and felt so rubbish.

A bunch of this novel is from the perspective of Droma's family as refugees, and I'm sure it's all great commentary on refugees or something, but it's just not even slightly entertaining to read whatsoever, and doesn't constitute anything of value to me and I doubt it will to many. The ‘drama' going on in this subplot is so predictable and again, flat. Then we never even actually get to see Droma reunite with his family.

The development I was hoping for Han to continue didn't happen. He just sorta goes around and does stuff. Are we seriously not gonna have a moment for Han and Leia to talk? Are we not going to finally address his behaviour and complete his redemption arc? Where did that entire plot go? Will someone else have to finish it for Luceno?

I'm honestly baffled. Did something happen behind the scenes? It doesn't feel like the same Luceno that wrote the last novel that was so brilliantly crafted and really made use of the slower pace and large list of characters.

He's also obviously trying to set up something with this Shesh character but my god they are so boring I kept forgetting who they were. I still am not entirely sure. I do not want to see most of the characters from this book return. I do not care about them.

The Kyp and Wurth stuff should've taken centre stage, but it didn't. It was more of a subplot which is a shame as it did more for Kyp's character, whilst exploring more weird Yuuzhan Vong stuff I love. But Wurth just dies after stuff is done to him off-screen, and I honestly kinda forgot what happened to Kyp lol.

So yeah, I'd honestly say this was kinda a shit novel. If Balance Point doesn't impress me much, I might have to take a break to not get burnt out, and I might take a break for a day or anything anyway.

I knew there was something off about this book at around 120 pages, so today, I decided to spend all day slowly making my way through it to get it out of the way.

So maybe a break is what I need.

A massive disappointment.

I think I'm getting ready to give up on the whole “Star Wars Expanded Universe” thing. It really seems like they're trying to stretch the story out as far as they possibly can, and deal with minutiae rather than fleshing out the main storyline and then resolving it in an interesting manner. When I see a story title like “New Jedi Order”, I expect to see Jedi ordering shit around, not the adventures of Han Solo and the Space Gypsies!