Agents of Chaos I: Hero's Trial

Seriously, what's up with these Star Wars books that take forever to get going? Do you guys even know what book series you're writing? I like character work as much as the next man, but in Star Wars it should happen during the action, not before it. I don't know how Luceno even got this one out to over 350 pages, because what happens is: Han Solo mopes and investigates some stuff with some guy who I guess was in another book, he gets in some fights, the Yuuzhan Vong attack a space station he's in, he stumbles into a plot, victory. Meanwhile, the actual plot is happening to bunch of characters who I am pretty sure I would not care about even if I did remember their fleeting appearances in The Black Fleet Crisis.

There's a three-page show more section where Luceno just describes technical modifications that happened to the Millennium Falcon in other books. Seriously!

Admittedly, Luceno is good at writing Han Solo, and that saves Hero's Trial. Han gets all the best lines, and is a total badass (as always), and his interplay with Droma is great. (I love how Han expects Droma to have heard of him, and Droma's like, "your real name's Han Organa?") The way he lucks and gambles his way through the assault on the Jubilee Wheel and the Queen of Empire are both utterly perfect. Also I really like it when Luke and Leia decide to fly in to help. And Luceno treats C-3PO as an actual character, which I think no novelist other than Stover has ever bothered to do. It's better than Stackpole's efforts, but the New Jedi Order is going to have to do better than this in the long term.

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Han is grieving over the loss of Chewbacca, so he takes off on a quest against the Yuuzahn Vong and gets involved with a Vong plot to spread plague to the Jedi. The story is OK, but the writing is only mediocre and there are too many cases where the author tries to be cute by working dialogue from the original movies into this storyline.

There were some things I liked about this book, and some things I didn't. On the positive side, there's the character of Droma the Ryn, and the camaraderie he shares with Han Solo, even on short notice. I liked how he helped Han return to being the character we all know and love after his period of mourning. And I really like the complexity of the relationship between Han and Anakin.

On the other hand, I thought there were way too many "blasts from the past" included, in terms of dialogue echoes from the movies, reminiscences, and characters either popping up or being mentioned from other books. Sure, some of that is fine, but this book had a lot of it. And the whole thing about C3PO worrying about his own mortality was just stupid. In show more fact, I wrote (several years ago) in my review of Vector Prime that one element that can make or break a Star Wars novel is how the author handles C3PO, and Luceno doesn't quite have a handle on him here (I mean, seriously..."Master Solo"? A small point, but how did that ever make it into print?). That doesn't make this a terrible example of Star Wars lit, but it's definitely cringeworthy in places. show less

Star Wars The New Jedi Order Agents Of Chaos 1: Heroes Trial tales the story of the continuing galaxy wide war with the Yuuzhan Vong. James Luceno does a nice job of portraying Han Solo's grief at the lose of Chewbacca. In my opinion the book flows just a little smoother and is just a little more involving than Micheal A. Stackpole's Dark Tide duo logy. It's an interesting and fun filled continuation of the NJO series.

I didn't love it. Partially because with these older "legends" books they were releasing fast and furious and several times the characters mentioned things I didn't remember from the previous book, so was left wondering if I missed a book. Meh not the end of the world.

A pretty solid Star Wars adventure overall just not amazing.

Another piece of the New Jedi Order series and a great rocking read of an adventure. This series is slowly expanding and you can tell their is a plan for all these books to tell a larger story while each tells it's own little bite.
I find these easy to read and a great insight into the expanded (although soon to be re-written) Star Wars Universe.