Nevanna's Forest of Stories

So I read the Matthew Stover Revenge of the Sith novelization ---

portico: why
me: i don't have to justify myself

-- but the actual reason is that I didn't want to listen to the A More Civilized Age podcast episodes about it without having read it myself to form my own opinions first, and the approximately eleven hours they spend talking about it gives me two full weeks of podcast time to fill my walk to work. Also I'd heard from a couple different people that it was unexpectedly good!

With affectionate respect to the people who told me this, I did not actually find this to be true. In fact I found the book somewhat worse than I expected. However, it is unexpectedly gay, and I do understand how people can substitute the one thing for the other. If you care about Anakin and Obi-Wan, let me tell you, you are in luck, so does Matthew Stover. If you care about Anakin and Padme -- scratch that. If you care about Padme in any capacity, you are less in luck. This is the most boring I Care About Nothing But Being A Love Interest Padme Amidala that I've ever seen and that includes the Padme in the film, where Natalie Portman is at least attemptiong to project 'I'm trapped in this narrative get me out of here' with her eyes. My frustrations here are exacerbated by having relatively recently read the Mon Mothma book that succeeded (to my mind) in making Mon Mothma a complex and compelling political figure who is often kind of a failure. I would love to see a Padme who's a complex and compelling failure of a political figure, which is the way I think she often comes across in the Clone Wars TV show ... not necessarily on purpose .... but someone could write her that way on purpose ...

But, on the other hand, I had no real reason to expect the Revenge of the Sith novelization could or should be political thriller; this is a book that is 50% fight scene by volume. Indeed the first 30% of the book is One Long Action Sequence. My understanding is that this is because the original script, from which Matthew Stover was working, is also 30% one long action sequence that got cut down to five minutes in the actual film. I'm sorry but this IS very funny, I sympathize deeply with this poor man desperately trying to pad out a lightsaber fight to fill three chapters with extensive discussion of forms like it's the duel in The Princess Bride, only to get to the first screening and go 'god damn it!'

Anyway. It's fine. If they tell you it's a critical text in the Star Wars universe I think you might want to take that with some grains of salt, but then again, I think the most critical text in the Star Wars universe is Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season Two Episode Three: The Solitary Clone so you might want to take anything I say with some grains of salt. But do you want a page of Obi-Wan thinking about Anakin's ass? This book will indeed give that to you.