Tried this for a few dozen pages. Would probably make a good TV show or TV movie, but it's not good enough to keep me going. Average IP-based genre fiction. ( )

I see where Stover was trying to go with the book. Harkening back to the pre-Zahn EU. But the books those days were just bad.
This was too mystical/magical and not following the established guidelines of what a Jedi could do. Luke seems to powerful for the time period. Leia relies to much on the force and she hasn't had any training yet. She doesn't till much later in the series. ( )

A couple weeks ago, TheForce.Net had its first-ever Aluminum Falcon awards for excellence in Star Wars fiction. Looking over the candidates for Best Novel, I was pretty underwhelmed, between the dreadful concluding novels of Legacy of the Force and the lackluster installments in the Coruscant Nights series. (I ended up picking Jedi Twilight because it was not terrible.) I wish voting hadn't ended before I read this, because not only is Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor the best Star Wars novel of 2008, it's probably one of the best ever published. Why is this? Because, quite simply, Stover gets Star Wars. The book's real glory is its characterizations: I've never seen so many of the original trilogy cast done right in one book probably ever. Luke is awesome, Leia is feisty, Han is roguish, the Rogues are all perfect. Even R2-D2 and C-3P0 get their moments. Even Lando Calrissian is done right. Do you know rare it is that he's in a book, much less written correctly? The book is heavily dependent on obscure continuity but pulls everything together effortlessly; the plot is both a fun action/adventure and your more nuanced Stover rumination. The book might be full of the Dark, but unlike so much modern Star Wars literature, it tells us not to be afraid of it. My only complaint is that there's really no point to a couple of the peripheral characters being there, but it's so much fun to see one of them again that I can't really complain about it that much.

The Star Wars Expanded Universe lucked out when they found Matt Stover. So far, he's written the deepest SW novel (Traitor), the darkest (Shatterpoint), and now the funnest* with Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor. Lots of action, tons of laughs, a billion EU references, and spot-on characterizations make this one of, if not the, best Star Wars novels ever.

*Not a real word, I know. Deal with it. ( )

I must admit that when I started this book I was a little concerned. Uncharacteristically for a Matthew Stover novel, it didn't grab me from page one. In fact, the first few chapters were, while certainly readable, not terribly compelling. And then I got to chapter four and was reminded why, whenever Stover releases a new novel, I drop everything else and read it immediately: because it is guaranteed to knock my socks off and leave me with a big stupid grin on my face. This novel is dedicated to Alan Dean Foster and Brian Daley, for good reason: it's a postmodern upgrade of the old-school rollicking adventure novel. Fun, funny, fast-paced, exciting, thrilling, heroes-against-incredible-odds storytelling that's nigh impossible to put down before you get to the end. Set shortly after the events of Return of the Jedi, the book's accessible to new fans, yet full enough of familiar characters and references to other Star Wars stories to satisfy even the most obsessed fanboy. Stover *gets* his characters, gets them exactly right, and he can still write an action scene better than anyone else in the business. I was silly to be concerned. Matt Stover persists in writing the best Star Wars stories to grace our bookshelves and our imaginations. Thank you, sir, for once again taking me back a long time ago, to a galaxy far, far away. ( )