Book Review: Dark Disciple

Title: Dark Disciple
Author: Christie Golden
Genre: Sci-Fi
Version: Hardback
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Del Rey
Synopsis: GoodReads
Notable Notables: New Canon Tie-In, Anti-Hero Protag
Recommended Readers: Fans of Star Wars, The Clone Wars, and specifically the Dark Side
Rating: ★★★★★

[This review was originally published on GoodReads.]

I did not give Dark Disciple five stars because it’s a perfect book (far from it, actually). I gave it five stars because of how totally and thoroughly I enjoyed it.

The front cover says, “Based on unproduced episodes of The Clone Wars,” and you can tell. You can just tell how fun these episodes were going to be if they’d been able to make them, and—having just finished the series myself—I was happy that I had this book to read to delay the goodbye process.

Now, let’s talk about things I liked:

• Ventress. She continues to be the star and queen that she is, and I love her so much.
• Dooku. I’m SO GLAD he was in this book as much as he was. So sassy, so impressive, and such a joy to read.
• Obi-Wan. Thank you, Christie Golden, for putting him in as much as you did, and for making him completely exasperated with everything. But I mean, can you have a Ventress-centered book without having Obi-Wan there? At the rate these two flirted all throughout the series? (And you can tell here how much Obi-Wan really likes Ventress. He really does. His respect for her in unreal, and it warms my heart.)
• Knowing that their mission to assassinate Dooku is a doomed one and being ready to see how badly everything is going to go. (But I wasn’t expecting that bad…)
• Dathomir. Got to see more of it, and I honestly appreciated seeing it with the love and regard that Ventress had for the place and its people.
• All the fight scenes/lightsaber fights. Enough said there.
• Learning more about the Dark Side of the Force. Always a plus.
• How scary the Jedi Council are. They just decide, “Hey, why don’t we hire someone to assassinate Dooku since we’re not allowed to do it ourselves?” Like, what? Why are they the good guys again??? Yet, this is under Things I Like, so what does that say about me?

Things I didn’t like:

• Really didn’t care for Vos. He had his moments certainly, but as a whole, he’s definitely not a favorite character. At least, not how this book was having me envision him.
• The romance between Vos and Ventress. I was so ready to love this, but it was not written very well. And it wasn’t even just Vos that was the problem. I thought that Ventress was very out of character here (not that she’s incapable of love, because she isn’t. It’s just the way she fell for him and vice-versa and how she acted afterwards that had me like ???? Who is this, and what have you done with Ventress?) I do try to remember that these were originally going to be three or four episodes of about 20-minutes apiece, so that’s not a lot of time to establish romance believably on top of everything else, but… That’s what a novel adaptation is for. To expand on things.
• The weird “is he or isn’t he dark side” thing was very sloppy and confusing, but I won’t go into spoilers here like I do on GoodReads.
• That ending. I completely reject it, and it didn’t happen. Seriously, I want to rip out the last 30 pages or so and just replace the whole thing with a huge rewrite. “But, Melody, it’s canon!” No, it absolutely is not. Get it away from me.

So yeah, I definitely have a love/hate relationship with this book, but the good things outweighed the bad for me, and I had a great time with it. An emotional rollercoaster for sure.