David's Review of Planet of Twilight

1/5 Rancors - I continue to have trouble with Ms Hambly's books. I did not like Children of the Jedi, the first book in the Callista Trilogy, and I think Planet of Twilight is also poorly written. On the other hand, Kevin J. Anderson's Darksaber, the second book in the series, was great fun to read.

In this current book, we find that Princess Leia has been taken captive by a mysterious warlord. Han and Chewie mount an effort to rescue her. Luke is still off on a quest to find Callista, his true love, and convince her to join with him. A virus that could end the universe has been released by strange and basically disgusting life forms. R2 and Threepio are stranded without help and are left to their own devices to make their way back to safety. A lot is happening but it does not tie together well and makes for a confusing plot. The author seems to delight in introducing new characters, new species, and new places, but in doing so she fails to devote enough effort to the Star Wars characters that we all know so well.

The book would benefit from a good editing job. Ms Hambly apparently feels that if one adjective will work, then three or four will work even better. I kept hoping that she would move on with the story and possibly explain the plot better. Just as an example, read the description of Leia's surroundings as she first comes out of a drugged state and looks around to see where she is.

"Weak, strangely colored sunlight lay in mosaics of glassy brightness across the cinder-colored permacrete walls of the house that loomed over them, glinted on the treeless lunacy of the heaped stone ridges, columns, pinnacles, and buttresses that dwarfed the house on three sides and framed, on the fourth, eternities of flashing gravel, as if the sea had sunk away long ago and left its foam solidified into salt and glass." One sentence. Arrgh!

I greatly look forward to moving on to subsequent books in the Expanded Universe.