Jedi Healer

Jedi Healer, by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry is the second and last of the Medstar duology. Good riddance. This book felt like a long and convoluted second half of a single volume. In the first book, titled Battle Surgeons, readers were introduced to a few, unknown characters who were part of a medical unit helping clone soldiers on a remote planet called Drongar.

The first novel primarily set up the characters, including Jedi Padawan Barriss Offee, who had been sent to Drongar to help heal people, and as a final test to her becoming a Jedi Knight. The other character prominent character introduced is Jos Vandar, a surgeon who fans will come to either love or hate throughout the series.

Though Battle Surgeons was fairly successful in revealing an interesting story, Jedi Healer fails on almost every level to deliver a satisfying conclusion. The only thing it has in its favor is a bit of humor, and the fact that it manages to tell a story not seen in the Clone Wars so far: a battle of spirit on an out-of-the-way planet, and does so without any major characters.

The Medstar duology truly should have been one book, and in fact, shouldn't have been published to begin with; there are simply too many problems in this series. For instance, early in the novel, we are told that Jos Vandar is Corellian. Strange, since the first book does a pretty good job of telling readers how his culture looks down very harshly on being involved with people not from his planet. Therefore, readers begin to assume his love interest, Tolk, is either not human at all, or that Jos is from a strange, secluded planet. Not so if he's from Corellia. But if that culture frowns on the prospect of people marrying from other cultures, why didn't Han Solo have a problem with getting involved with Leia in the Original Trilogy, or in the subsequent books? Why was it never mentioned? To the authors' credit, later in the book, there's talk of how attitudes on Corellia are changing but it comes far too late to keep the reader from being helplessly confused.

This book was also horribly proof-read–much like this review–and spelling mistakes, grammar errors, and many other problems mar this book throughout. As if the problem with Corellians being ostracized marrying “eksters” isn't bad enough, it's even worse when they refer to the same thing as “eskers” several times. Make up your mind please. (Note to LucasBooks and Del Rey Editors: Microsoft Word has an excellent feature called ‘Find & Replace' I would also turn off the proofreading markup features and try reading these manuscripts. You'd catch more errors that way.) Star Wars books have been getting progressively worse about these types of errors lately, and it's embarrassing to see how poorly some of these books read.

As if proofreading mistakes weren't enough to drive the reader crazy, many of our modern-day sayings and phrases are translated and inserted into Jedi Healer. In fact, the language rating of this novel would have to be at least PG-13. After all, “no mopek” isn't going to fool anybody. A few ‘curse' words won't bother some people, but it just sounds dumb to see “getting his drive tubes scoured,” when we know what they mean. It's okay every now and then, but not as often as this book parades these phrases around.

Among the other problems in this book, and quite possibly the most frustrating: it has a see-through plot. Near the end of Battle Surgeons, the authors set up the fact that there's a spy in the midst of the characters introduced. Readers will probably begin to suspect a particular character as the spy, and will most likely be correct. Throughout most of Jedi Healer, Reaves and Perry try to keep a lot of drama going on this fact, hoping that it will pay off at the ‘reveal' near the end. However, they do very little to draw guilt away from the character most readers should be suspicious of. Granted, the authors try to distract the reader, in poor fashion and with more embarrassing, overlooked mistakes, but the story is so cliché that it fails to excite. Readers may doubt their assumptions once or twice, but when the Reveal finally happens, it's entirely too short, and extremely un-gratifying. It's not surprising at all; downright disappointing is more like it.

Though the book suffers through many hurdles, it does have its high points. Unfortunately, those high points are still depressingly low. A couple of fairly noteworthy events are the appearance of a Republic Star Destroyer, and a mention of the Modal Nodes–the band playing in the cantina in A New Hope. Another fascinating–if not confusing–point talks about Republic weapon tests of what we can only assume is the Death Star.

Overall, the book tries to deliver a story, but instead reveals itself for what it truly is: a commercial attempt to extort the Star Wars franchise in order to elicit fans to buy the latest offering. Del Rey knows that fans will buy it if it says Star Wars. It's sad that they would use that to promote this Medstar duology. Rather than write books around a good story, they tried to wrap an ill-conceived story around two books, to make money not just once, but twice. What easily could have been a single volume was instead split into two. Twice the page count, twice the profit, right? Or was it simply because there were two authors? Either way, these books could have never seen the light of a word processor, and it probably would have been for the better.

Unless you're a die-hard fan, who doesn't need the extra $14 USD, skip ‘em.