Star Wars: Children of the Jedi (The Callista Trilogy, #1) in The Expanded Universe

May 13, 2009 Wicked ♥ (Wickedly Bookish Reviews) aka Bat-Jess rated it liked it

Shelves: 2010, sci-fi, star-wars, books-i-own

I noticed when I picked this up how many bad reviews it has received from fellow goodreads members. So, naturally I expected to utterly hate this, but I really actually enjoyed parts of it. I will admit it definitely isn't the best Star Wars novel ever or even close, but it wasn't utterly unreadable either like some Kevin J. Anderson books I've had to choke my way through. *cough*JediAcademyTrilogy*coug* Yes, it the Luke/Callista thing is a bit weird and makes me a tad uncomfortable, but it work ...more

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Apr 06, 2008 Keith rated it it was ok

Shelves: star-wars

Stars: 2
Re-read? No
Recommend to: Only people wanting to read every SW book.

I definitely didn't like this book, but I wouldn't consider it in the running for worst Star Wars book ever like many others do. I spent most of my times perplexed at the decision making regarding the plot and writing style. Both didn't really work.

Hambly writes descriptions and particularly dialogue in a confusing manner. This made it pretty difficult to follow the events at times. I would get annoyed when I'd go back a Stars: 2
Re-read? No
Recommend to: Only people wanting to read every SW book.

I definitely didn't like this book, but I wouldn't consider it in the running for worst Star Wars book ever like many others do. I spent most of my times perplexed at the decision making regarding the plot and writing style. Both didn't really work.

Hambly writes descriptions and particularly dialogue in a confusing manner. This made it pretty difficult to follow the events at times. I would get annoyed when I'd go back and re-read a paragraph because I didn't understand who was speaking or what was going on. This problem was more or less isolated to the first 50-100 pages though, so I'm not sure what happened.

The bigger problem by far were the decisions regarding the plot. (view spoiler)

I also struggled to understand a few major points of the overall plot. (view spoiler)

Other things:
- I did like the Nichos character. (view spoiler)
- Hambly apparently didn't know that lightsabers could cut through durasteel. I know this came out in 1995 before we see that kind of thing happen in the movies, but we do see sabers cutting through very strong things like in the fight in ROTJ. I think it is logical to assume it would cut through durasteel. (view spoiler)
- Luke's cohabitants were too silly. (view spoiler)
- The Will is interesting but grossly underutilized. (view spoiler)
- Good Lord is it silly that (view spoiler)

First Read: 2008
I had a really hard time getting into this book in the beginning. There were a lot of times that I was confused about who a character was, what was happening in the plot, and even sometimes couldn't figure out what a sentence meant. The author has a tendency to include a character you know nothing about at all in the story and it isn't until two or three pages later you read why the character had the conversation you just read. The first hundred pages was just a confusing read. The story gets a lot better as it goes on though so it is worth struggling through the beginning. Like many star wars novels I have read recently, I feel that the characters complicate a simple scenario and take a more difficult approach to solve a problem. ...more

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