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| Kindle eBook, n.pag. Published 2006 Acquired December 2013 Read February 2014 |
by Karen Traviss
Year Zero of the Invasion
The recent publication of Invasion, a comic series taking place during The New Jedi Order, has me revisiting the series, which originally ran from 1999 to 2003-- amazingly it finished over ten years ago now! There are a number of peripheral additions to the series (short stories, comics, and the like) that I didn't read at the time, so I'm giving those a shot this time around, starting with A Practical Man, a prequel novella that sets the stage for what Boba Fett and the Mandalorians were up to during the Yuuzhan Vong invasion.
Unfortunately, it doesn't do much more than that. A Practical Man is largely a dot-connecting exercise, with little insight into the Mandalorians in general or Boba Fett in particular. Which is a shame, because Boba Fett going from the ultimate loner to the leader of an entire civilization ought to be fertile ground for Traviss's usually excellent character work, but that just doesn't happen here. There are glimpses of it, and I like the contrast between the different warrior ethos of the Mandalorians and the Yuuzhan Vong, but this story is too fundamentally simple to be interesting.
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