It's been a long time since I read a Star Wars novel, so I decided to start up again. This is the earliest book in the timeline, telling of a time before the Jedi existed. Instead, we have Force-sensitive characters in an order called the Je'daii. They don't have lightsabers, but carry actual swords. They aren't knights, they are Rangers. This story is set many millennia before the Republic, in a time where they didn't even have hyperspace travel. The world is smaller, mainly concerned with the planet Tython. One aspect I liked is that the planet has two moons, Ashla an Bogan, and the Je'daii of Tython use these as terms to describe the light and dark sides of the Force.
Je'daii Ranger Lanoree Brock is sent on a mission to find her brother Dal, long believed to be dead. He has shunned the Force and gotten involved with a group called Stargazers who aren't content to stay on Tython or the few surrounding planets but want to see more of the galaxy. He seeks out ancient technology to use dark matter in hopes of opening a hypergate that will allow further travel... but this might also destroy the planet and all life on it. There are deep mysteries down in the caverns of Tython, mysteries which maybe shouldn't be explored.
I have mixed feelings about this book. It's a serviceable story about divided siblings, one a darling of the Je'daii who loves the Force and one who is pulled to the dark. I do have a few qualms. For one, the book is populated not just with humans but with typical Star Wars fare like Twi'leks and Wookiees. But the story only really works if Tython is cut off from the galaxy. So we have to introduce a conceit that millennia ago all these different species came or were brought to this planet and somehow this technology was lost. I think the book would have worked better if it had the guts to not populate with known aliens. And it's also crazy to begin a story set so far back in time, and yet within it there are over 9 millennia of past history involving a technologically advanced race known as the Gree. In a way, some of it felt like reading a later Dune novel, right down to the little epigraphs that open each chapter.
The worst thing about the book is its slow pacing. There just isn't enough story here and it gets drawn out as we move from location to location not advancing the plot very far. Each chapter includes a flashback to Lanoree and Dal's early Je'daii training pilgrimage. Lebbon makes the very odd choice of telling the flashbacks in present tense. Using tense to differentiate between time frames isn't a bad idea, but it seems to me it would have made more sense to tell the present story in the present tense and the flashbacks in past tense. There are several mysterious plot threads hinted at early on that reference events of long ago, but these end up not going anywhere or being followed up on. It made me wonder if they were sequel bait for later stories in this Dawn of the Jedi initiative.
I did like going back so far and seeing what the Jedi might have been like before their religion was codified and their rules stricter. This is not a world that abolishes attachments. It's nice to divorce the world from laser swords and hyperdrives (though blasters are still here). I think Lebbon writes the Force pretty well, and the book is at its best when Lanoree is sensing it and trying to maintain balance. There's also a subplot about Lanoree performing "alchemy of the flesh", experimenting through the Force to manipulate biological material cloned from her own cells. Could this be the beginnings of how Anakin was created? Where Lebbon is less successful is in writing action sequences. I wasn't all that interested in most of them, and found them sort of flat and boring, as if they were included because he had to put them in, but it's really not where he excelled as a writer.
Overall, the ideas and hints at the larger world were more interesting than the story itself. It wasn't an amazing book, but neither was it one that made me angry.
GRADE: C
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