Lockdown: Star Wars (Maul)
Joe Schreiber
Random House Publishing Group - Del Rey Spectra
LucasBooks
Pub Date Jan 21 2014
3/5 Stars
The premise of Darth Maul Lockdown is an incredibly interesting one. A pre-Phantom Menace Darth Maul is set to a prison colony where he must not reveal his true identity in order to get to a arms dealer who is supposedly going to allow him to make some kind unique deal. The whole thing made more complicated by the fact that he cannot use his force abilities. Also, the prison colony holds fights between prisoners that are bet on and televised. All of this makes for one pressure cooker of a story. Except it doesn’t…
The book is too long to support it’s story and I won’t spoil anything here but the last 25% of the book is better than the other 75%. There are numerous characters introduced, point of view characters change repeatedly. The book feels like it needed another couple of final edits. In fact, one of the most interesting characters in the entire book seems to be revealed from no where when the book is 2/3 of the way finished. I found myself wondering why we as readers had to suffer through this incredibly boring preamble to the good part of the book. Only for the book to quite abruptly end. And I do mean abruptly. I would have either liked to read another one hundred pages with this new character or simply had the boring middle part of the book be replaced by this. I also felt that the attempt to make Darth Maul a kind of anti-hero also fell pretty flat. Especially in the end when it seems like he had no character arc. So if he wasn’t supposed to be the hero, making him a little more villainous might have been a better move. Not that he wasn’t villainous at times in the book. But over all, as I said it seemed like the author was trying to make him an anti-hero. I haven’t read a Star Wars book in a little while so I was eager to read this. I’m glad I read it, but it certainly could have been a better book. The author proved that in the last 25%.
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