Agents of Chaos I: Hero's Trial (Star Wars: The New Jedi Order, #4) in The Expanded Universe

Dec 05, 2009 Keith rated it liked it

Shelves: star-wars

Stars: 3.5
Re-read: Yes
Recommend to: Obviously this is for people pretty deep into the EU.

James Luceno is typically a solid 3-star author for me. His books are usually pretty interesting, but they'll rarely wow me. He has a mostly bad habit of including every established character he can regardless of whether or not it makes sense to have the famous character involved. Sometimes this is really good. I'd say he does a pretty good job with established characters in this book. He clearly has done hi Stars: 3.5
Re-read: Yes
Recommend to: Obviously this is for people pretty deep into the EU.

James Luceno is typically a solid 3-star author for me. His books are usually pretty interesting, but they'll rarely wow me. He has a mostly bad habit of including every established character he can regardless of whether or not it makes sense to have the famous character involved. Sometimes this is really good. I'd say he does a pretty good job with established characters in this book. He clearly has done his homework on the EU and really goes out of his way to make reference after reference about previous books and characters. I don't think I've seen any other author put this amount of effort in, which is nice. In this book, it was nice (view spoiler) There are many references that people who haven't read the entire EU won't get (like a reference to Bria Tharen), but it probably wouldn't be noticeable for them. It does become a minor annoyance when every example of something has to be something well-known to the audience. So Luceno wanted to say some old starship is a valuable relic, and he'll use the J-Type 327 Nubian as the example (which was Amidala's ship in Episode I). You just kind of roll your eyes at these when he'll choose one of the few starships you're likely to recognize when there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of types of starships in the galaxy.

The plot is better in this book compared to books 2&3, although the focus on Han should not have taken a two book hiatus. The insane decision to have Han (view spoiler)

The world-building makes more sense in this book than the previous few, but it is still perplexing why we don't see a massive response to the invasion. (view spoiler) I liked that Luceno finally gives us some more depth on the Yuuzhan Vong hiearchy and their relative strength.

There was one key plot point that I found laughable. (view spoiler)

Previous Reads: 3-stars (2003/2006) ...more

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