** spoiler alert ** "In the end, what we are is ... alone" Using the bracket of the ongoing clone wars as a backdrop this book tells of the interaction between many different force users. There's this team of young Padawani and their masters sent out on a mission with a disastrous outcome. There's the veteran Jedi-Elite-Team Skywalker/Kenobi coming to the(ir) rescue. There's the Sith-Couple Dooku (Darth Tyrannus is still an inbearably stupid name) and his student Assajj Ventress that made her first escape from the Comic books into the "true" literature with this novel. And then there's Yoda having trained most of the afore mentioned in some kind or another. And he is forced to remember much of his personal history with the Count while going willingly into a trap, hoping that the once bright and shining young Jedi will be salvageable from the realms of Darkness, just to have everything shatter in one of the Padawans ancestral home where the dark side is strong and madness rules.

This book is very different from your classical Clone Wars narrative in that there are only few mentions of the wars at large, no Clone Troopers need to be led in the fields and on most levels it could havwe happened any time during or outside the infamous clone wars. But then it's also one of the best written and most well-thought-out Books that ever were published in this storyline, not the least because it hadn't to take care of all those much clichéd story parts and usual random elements inserted into other books. And it has those great portraials of Yoda and Dooku in past and present while having the chuzpe to awaken the hope that a new generation of Jedi Knights might grow up during the war but not scarred and maimed by it, only to remember then that it's only months until the temple will get wiped clean of such innocent younglings...

I won't pretend it's world literature, but it's as good as they're coming when compared to the other SW novels and does scratch on the "must read" barrier for every scifi enthusiast who at least knows the movies and might tolerate reading more in that universe created for the silver screen.