76 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Luceno doing what Luceno does. . ., November 26, 2004
James Luceno, walking EUncyclopedia, returns once more with yet another of the type of novel he's best suited to write. His particular strengths and weaknesses are ill-spent on smaller novels such as Agents of Chaos; however, with his comprehensive grasp of GFFA minutiae, he's very well suited to novels such as Cloak of Deception and this newest, Labyrinth of Evil (and to an extent, The Unifying Force), which exist as much to tie multiple plots together into a comprehensive, coherent whole as to tell stories of their own. Here he manages to take a very impressionistic view of the Clone Wars, told piecemeal in various media and through various relatively unconnected novels, and meld it all into a whole, as well as tying events back to pre-TPM and doing his best to make it look like there actually has been a lot more structure and continuity and causality in the stories we've gotten of the Clone Wars than there really has been.
There's not really much need to talk about his style; by now you already know whether you like it or not. He has an odd mix of typical third-person POV and near-omniscient viewpoint, without a particularly memorable writing style and with a sometimes-annoying but often useful and fun (at least to the more-than-casual Star Wars fans like me) tendency to infodump and show off just how much he knows about what he's writing about.
This novel doesn't stand terribly well on its own, but then it's not supposed to. It's more a summation and drawing-together of what's gone before in anticipation of Revenge of the Sith. To that end, the first two-thirds of the book follow a very straightforward connect-the-dots plot, with the dots being a lot of fun action sequences and the connectors being lots of encyclopedic, almost history-bookish descriptions tying together all that's gone before. Then, for the final third, the book takes a dramatic turn for the better -- and more exciting (especially for me, since I've been keeping myself spoiler free for Revenge of the Sith) -- as the book leads straight into what will prove to be the HUGE opening moments of the final Star Wars film.
Here we see Anakin and Obi-Wan, Mace and Yoda all in fine form. Padmé, Bail Organa, Mon Mothma and other familiar faces also all show up. Dooku, while not quite as fleshed-out as in Dark Rendezvous, is still an interesting character. Palpatine and Sidious are as good as we've ever seen them, if not better (and worse). And finally, finally we get an introduction to the character of General Grievous, whom we've seen in comics and television shows but has been conspicuously absent from the novels. Also in this book we've got some pointed political commentary that those leaning more to the right probably won't particularly appreciate, we've got a fine antecedent for a key moment in ANH, and, in true Star Wars fashion, plenty of dis-arming and other dis-memberment.
In the end, this is for the most part an okay Star Wars novel that blossoms in the end into one of the better ones, and leaves you salivating for Revenge of the Sith.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent reading., March 25, 2005
An excellent prequil to the third movie.
The first half of this book, admittably, starts off a little slow. Somewhere near the middle it fires up and intensifies. It goes in a pattern of 1)dividing the story: between the perspectives of Anakin and Obi-wan, and the of everybody else on Coruscant, and of course the villains; and 2)chapters of character developement, with plenty of pages of plot and depth that were left out in the first two movies. Want to know the origin of Grievous? It's in there. What about the plots of Sidious to rule the galaxy? That too. And, what about Anakin and Obi-wan following Dooku, and all the space battles in-between? Yup, all that too. A good buy. Just don't stop half-way in the middle.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read this book, you must!, February 18, 2005
Do you want to know who trained Darth Sidious? If Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas actually placed the order for the clone army? Who killed Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas and why? How Count Dooku found and was trained by Sidious? How Jango Fett was actually recruited as the template for the clones? It's all here!
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