Invincible

So, I finished my Star Wars series! Yay! I mean, I look forward to future books, but mostly I’d been a little concerned for the previous several books of this series that it was running off the rails, and now that can no longer be an issue. Plus, it mostly didn’t, which is even better. Invincible documents the finale of yet another galactic civil war in which some people from the Skywalker family face off against each other on opposite sides, Jedi vs. Sith, and… well, probably the good guys prevail? History does have a way of repeating itself, I guess.

But I really did like a lot of it. It had more of a swashbuckling, John-Williams-scored Star Wars feel than most books in the series have had, for one thing. For another, there was finally a pay-off to all the Boba Fett devotion from earlier in the series, that made it look in this book like he wasn’t only included as a sop to the fans. (It didn’t retroactively fix previous books with the same problem, but those mostly skated by because he and his people are interesting, at least.)

The one flaw I did find was just how short and quick of a book it was. After praising the stately, thoughtful pacing of the first half of the series, and then being a little annoyed by how things seemed to go nowhere in the last few books, this one was like a bucket of ice water in the face. Fun, exciting things happened, but in especially the last third of the book, they happened way too quickly, without any time to pause and incorporate the new circumstances. I feel like either the last few books could have been plotted more tightly, this one could have been longer, or both. It was really only the overwhelming speed that kept this from being an entirely satisfying novel that resolved the series neatly and left me ready for what’s next. Instead, I’m left with a combination of gradually draining adrenaline, a sense of ‘Well, that happened’, and a sense of “Huh? That happened?’ Which, okay, sounds pretty unsatisfactory on the page. What you have to account for is that the Star Wars adrenaline rush, when performed correctly, is a thing of great influence over one’s mood.

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