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After reading "Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina," I thought this would be a nice follow up book. However, I quickly found the stories a little too extravagant - even in the "Star Wars" universe. Sometimes complicated story additions try to add some depth to the events of "Return of the Jedi." Furthermore, many of the stories in this book have changed throughout the past few years. While this certainly doesn't fall on the authors, having been written in the mid 90's, I still found some of these stories hard to get through.
First I read Tales from the Empire. Then I read Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina. Then I read Tales from Jabba's Palace. My evaluation? Jabba's Palace is an okay book, but I liked Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina more. The stories are all interconnected, with much storyline repeated from the perspectives of different characters. This is accomplished with a monotonous retelling of previously-explained story, exactly as it was originally explained. After reading these three short-story collections, I started feeling a sense of...well, I had a bad feeling. In the introductory story, the back story is given for the Rancor's keeper. I'm no Star Wars purist, but the idea of authors writing stories about these inconsequential characters just seems...pointless. I'm not saying that stories should be written only about the popular characters, like Han Solo, for example, but that the movie is finished--why try to delve into characters that really aren't that interesting? They're in the periphery for a reason: they're not that interesting. The stories seemed a pale imitation of the movies, and often the authors would insert certain facts that would alter the Star Wars canon, so as to give their story more weight. This was almost insulting to read, somehow. Usually I prefer reading the book to watching the movie, but these collections intruded on what I knew about the movie, and I preferred not to have these authors tell me their story about what led to a certain character's demise, or whatever. Mainly because the stories weren't very entertaining, and I preferred to keep MY beliefs about how certain characters ended up dying in the fray. Actually, many of the characters were too boring for me to even think about them beyond their bizarre physical appearances. A good example of the authors altering the canon is in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina. Apparently, Luke Skywalker got the idea to tangle the legs of the AT-AT from a Stormtrooper who joined the Rebels. Something about this just seemed lame to me. Is tripping the assault vehicles with the tall, ungainly legs really such a hard thing to figure out? Also, in Tales from Jabba's Palace, the cook apparently feeds Han Solo to help him get his strength up. This endears the character to the readership, I suppose, but again, it seems awfully contrived to me. I don't know if Kevin Anderson, the editor, watered down the stories, but they all have a very generic feeling to them. It's as if the authors watched the movies and then tried to copy the behaviors of the protagonists exactly, and the antagonists exactly. The attempts at humor are very rarely effective, and it seems as though every story eventually reaches a point where a ship "makes the jump to hyperspace." I hated Tales from the Empire, because it was downright boring. But the two following collections were significantly better. I have Tales of the Bounty Hunters and Tales from the New Republic, but I doubt that I'll read them. Perhaps I'm simply not a fan of fan-fiction. Oh, and the stories I hated the most (actually, I was mostly neutral to many of the stories, so the ONLY stories I hated, I should say) concerned the Anzati "snot vampire." The style did NOT fit in with any of the other stories, and that isn't to say that it was a welcome deviation from the generic style of the other stories. I found it embarrassing. This is Star Wars, for crying out loud. She (Jennifer Robeson)wrote in a way that was too poetic and pretentious.Read full review
Fun read with a lot of behind the scenes of what was going on during what we were seeing during movie
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
Perfect product with accurate description!
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
i just love the star wars story line there is so much there plus the short story about mara jade it awsome
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