I enjoyed this title the most of the first three books in the series. It's fun to see a young Obi-Wan Kenobi learning how to trust in the Force and watching his relationship with Qui-Gon come into being... though there is a LONG way for these two to go. ( )

Qui-Gon has finally accepted Obi-Wan as his apprentice. The two are supposed to head to the planet Gala to oversee their elections, but instead get hijacked to Phindar by a pair of brothers who want the Jedi to help prevent the artificial food and medial supply shortages that the rulers of their planet have imposed. Part of the ruling Syndicat's method of control is erasing the memories of any Phindarians who oppose them. There are some good scenes between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan that I enjoyed. Overall, this book suffers from what most of the series suffers from: Watson trying to do too much in too little space and thereby providing a very surface-level story. ( )

(I now maintain a blog just for my kid-lit reviews. Find it at http://kidlit4adults.blogspot.com .)

A friend has convinced me to try my hand this year for the first time at writing children's literature; but I don't actually know anything about children's literature, so am starting the process among other ways by first reading a stack of popular books that have been recommended to me. Today's titles are from yet another long-running series of chapter books for grade-schoolers, the kind of franchise where an endless amount of 30,000-word volumes are cranked out once a month by a series of essentially anonymous authors; and this is actually one of the types of employment I'm hoping to find in the industry myself, which is why I'm reading so many of these types of books these days, to understand more about how exactly they're written.

And indeed, after expecting these to be only middling titles that rely mostly on the strength of the "Star Wars" brand for their commercial success, the three volumes of the "Jedi Apprentice" series I read (volumes 1, 2 and 3) were instead some of the better chapter books I've so far come across this year, with challenging vocabularies and nicely complex moral lessons that have more in common with Zen Buddhism than the Babysitters Club. (But then again, this series is put out by the always excellent Scholastic, so I guess I should've known better.) Although these will only appeal almost exclusively to boys in the 10-to-12 range, they're excellent for what they are, and get the classic "rules" of writing for this age group almost perfect -- for example, they include plenty of periil but very little real-world danger (helped immensely by their fantastical setting), feature plenty of action but a stripped-down non-confusing plot, and also do a nice job for sci-fi novels at exploring both school environments and inter-gender relationships at that age in depth. They're on the large side of such books, a full 30,000 to 35,000 words apiece, and despite their subject matter are not recommended for so-called "reluctant readers." ( )

After Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn are hijacked to planet Phindar, they find themselves trapped in a world gone mad. The ruling Syndicat controls the people by erasing their memories. The planet’s only hope lays with a band a thieving rebels.
Qui-Gon and Obi-“Wan are caught in a mind war.
And if they’re not careful, their own pasts will be wiped out forever. But one of them was not careful enough. ( )