Shatterpoint

This is Stover's second addition to the Star Wars EU after TRAITOR. This is a fantastically dark book, regardless of its SW roots. This is a journey that ultimately defined Mace Windu as a Jedi whereas the movies did a lot to skim over his role. Picture HEART OF DARKNESS but with Jedi and you'll have a very accurate view of how this story unfolds.

While this is my least favorite SW novel by Matt Stover, it's still one of the best things I've ever read. The heartbreak involved with watching a Jedi Master, a man who has devoted his whole life to the Order and the greater workings of the Force, become utterly helpless as the Force seemingly abandons him is truly worth the price of admission.

It has its faults: the extended battle sequence toward the end being a glaring one to a slow reader like myself, but that doesn't stop it from becoming one of the best SW novels ever. ( )

This was very good and bloody /gory though.
Good book for young adults ( )

This book was fast-moving and action-packed. It was dark and intense, with many deaths and frequently no clear right or wrong answers - even the questions were unclear, which is often true in moral dilemmas. The setup made sense, some of the characters had interesting stories and motivations, and the end worked and was satisfying, even if it wasn't exactly a happy ending.

It all seemed a bit heavy-handed, though. I can't really remember any happy or funny or even really very neutral scenes in the book - almost the whole thing is depressing, stressful, angry, horrifying, or some combination. Anything positive gets cut off pretty much before it starts. And it also seemed to happen rather fast, although granted there is a lot that happened prior to the beginning of the book - the setup I mentioned - that we only hear about. ( )

I haven't been keeping up with the Star Wars novels lately, but I had been curious about this one. It wasn't what I expected. A page-turner to be sure, with lots of fighting and action and light-sabery goodness, but there's something much deeper going on here.

Shatterpoint is set after Attack of the Clones. Mace Windu receives a troubling message from his former Padawan Depa Billaba. Now Mace must travel to the jungle world of Haruun Kal to find Depa and either save her or destroy her.

The thing that both impresses and disturbs me about the book is how it addresses one of the flaws of the Star Wars universe. In the movies, we see a galaxy at war. Over a million worlds. And yet the war is clean. Sterile. Ships pop out of existence in flashy explosions. Anonymous stormtroopers fall with bloodless blaster wounds. Even lightsabers leave cauterized, clean wounds. An entire world blows up, and Obi Wan Kenobi gets a headache. The horrors are there, but you never see them.

Stover shows us a world devastated by war. Depa Billaba was sent to help drive the separatists from Haruun Kal, and she's done so, but at what cost? The planet's people are divided, slaughtering one another in the jungles even after the galactic conflict has moved on.

Stover hammers the theme home. War is not a heroic band fighting their way past faceless enemies to blow up the Death Star and save the galaxy. It's watching your friends die of parasites and diseases, because you have no way of getting the basic medical treatment that could have saved them. It's a child stabbing a wounded soldier again and again, because that child has never known anything but war and hate. It's mutilating your enemies' bodies because you no longer see them as human. For Mace Windu, it's struggling to find the right path, the Jedi path, when all of your choices lead to darkness and death.

It's a powerful book. A little heavy-handed at times, perhaps. But I have a lot of respect for Stover for going beyond the flash-bang special effects and the relatively clean imagery of the movies and reminding readers that it ain't so. ( )

This is one of the most emotionally intense Star Wars books I have read so far. Mace Windu is placed against an entire planet at war with it self; a senseless, bloody, and endless war. The book shows how even a Jedi can fail, suffer, hurt, and be left ragged. No other book that I've read made the Jedi seem so human, so fallible, and so imperfect. The story really made me respect Mace as a Jedi, from his fighting prowess to his strategic mind he is an opponent to be feared.

Maces struggle throughout his adventure made me want to fight and be more steadfast in every difficult aspect of my own life. When he feels pain and loss you feel it with him. When he exudes power it was as if I felt that power. The job the author did with the conveying emotions was amazing, even the minor characters have lives, hopes and fears of their own and they all seem so realistic that you empathize with their ups and downs.

Even though the events of the book are of course fictional, in a very real way it highlights the fact that war in itself is a pointless and futile action under any circumstance and that no matter who wins everyone looses in the end. This is in the simplest terms a very good read and one I would very much hope the average reader would not pass over just because it says Star Wars on the front, you don't need to be a dungeons and dragons playing geek to appreciate this book, if you have have some time I urge you to give it a try. ( )