Book Review: Star Wars: Padawan

 

Padawan is a young-adult canon novel set sometime before the events of The Phantom Menace. In the book, Obi-Wan is chafing under his clashing style with Qui-Gon, feeling that he is not learning from Qui-Gon, and is thus not being a good Padawan to Qui-Gon. In researching the archives, Obi-Wan learns of the location of a mysterious planet that was found by a Jedi Wayfinder, who believed the planet was worth studying. Since there was no record of the Jedi ever returning, Obi-Wan proposes a mission to the planet that he hopes will bring him and Qui-Gon closer together. Obi-Wan ends up traveling to the planet alone and finds a group of younglings who appear to be force-sensitive that are being attacked by everything on the planet, including the planet itself. 

The book is a very good stand-alone story. Even though the story is mostly self-contained, there are some tie-ins (some subtle some not) to the movies and animated series including how Obi-Wan first met Dex, the alien that ran the diner in Attack of the Clones. It is basically a story about Obi-Wan finding his place in the Jedi order and his connection to The Force. The book is on the longer side of the young-adult novels, at just over 400 pages. Even so, it is a fairly quick read, so if you are a fast reader you should easily be able to finish it in a day or two. The story is good but not as good as the stories in some of the other novels. If I could, I would give it 4.5 stars, but that is not an option and I think it is better than a four-star novel, which is why I ended up rating it five stars.