Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I couldn't rate this book, because I keep oscillating between giving it 1 star and 5 stars, and averaging at 3 is just too wrong. I want to give it a 1 for the writing style which was clunky and weird, and a 5 for how hilarious I found some of the clunky, weird descriptions of characters (“Alone in the room, Kylo Ren - saturnine of aspect, lithe of build, tortured of mien, and troubled of eye -gazed at the silent recipient of his confession” - I MEAN HOW PERFECTLY HILARIOUS IS THAT), and so much of the dialogue that I was hella pleased didn't make it into the movie.

I really couldn't get used to BB-8 being spelled “Beebee-Ate” whenever a character said it out loud, and I wish I'd started counting how many times the author uses the word “countenance” from the beginning because it's FAR TOO MANY. That is a word I used when I wrote poetry in high school after looking up a synonym for “face”. AND I ONLY USED IT ONCE. There's also a lot of referring to Rey as “the girl”. Also a lot of getting inside the minds of the droids, weirdly: “Capable of comprehending the causes of nausea, the droid was fortunate it was not a condition his kind were subject to, but his internal gyros were being forced to work overtime.” “While he was in his own way equally disappointed, C-3PO was not programmed to display it. Instead, he merely expressed a rational regret.”

And this long and basically useless description: “Only on very rare occasions did C-3PO encounter a need for forward speed. This was one of them, but his ambulatory programming restricted him to a gait that was less than satisfactory. If only, he mused, he could move as fast as he could talk. Despite his motive infirmity he eventually found General Organa deep in intense conversation with a tactical specialist.”
I can give C-3PO “musing” a pass because he seems like a droid who might muse, though I'm more likely to believe that he never thinks anything that he doesn't also say out loud - but that is a lot of words for saying that he walks slow and none of those words were “walk” or “slow”. I'm not saying that all writing needs to be simple and to the point, but if I'm going to read something with so many synonyms in it, I really need for it to roll off the tongue a bit better.

Basically - the way this book was written reminds me of what my writing looks like when I write fiction, and I am bad at writing fiction. But, I read the whole thing and I didn't rate it because it legitimately amused me!