Star Wars: Kenobi, John Jackson Miller

Star Wars: Kenobi
John Jackson Miller
ISBN: 9780345546838
Read January 13, 2014

This one has been on my "to read" pile since November, and I'm finally whittling that particular month's pile down.  It's funny that I just read Verily, A New Hope before reading this one, because it made a few asides and comments by the characters much more pointed than they would otherwise have been.  In particular, a story about an actor who was aged by exposure to the harsh desert winds and suns so that in half a year, he looked to have aged twenty years! was vastly amusing.

Miller admits in the acknowledgements that he originally planned this story as a graphic novel, in a western milieu - and it shows.  That's not a bad thing, actually.  His scenes are gritty and sand-filled, the western analogues of cowboy and Indian transfer nicely into moisture farmers and Tusken Raiders, and his descriptive passages have a visual flow and movement to them that is quite agreeable.

With a story like this, the journey really is the point, because anyone reading already knows how it turns out.  How we get there is the only real interest value, and I enjoyed the ride for the most part.  Downsides do exist: the opening acts were a bit slow to get rolling, I thought that "Ben's" narrative voice in the meditation sections was off, and the unraveling of the antagonist's plans, mind, and life happened a bit too quickly; but these are piddly details.  Overall, it was a fun ride in a familiar landscape, with a whole cast of new and interesting characters and one very familiar person trying to find a new niche in life.

Is it the next Thrawn Trilogy?  Hell no.  Is it comparable to Shadows of the Empire (the novel, not that impenetrable multimedia octopus, thank you very much) or I, Jedi?  Yeah, for me it was, although the gritty tone and small-town Tattooine setting much more closely matches the tight focus and small stakes of the short stories in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina or Tales from Jabba's Palace anthologies.  Overall, a solid addition to the EU, and one that I hope makes it into the soon-to-be-established canon. 

Final thought: Sand People are seriously hard-core.