Lit Jude Watson

Considering they are young adult books, I understand why the characters are so cut-and-dry.

 

I like the Jedi Apprentice series, and I even have the two Special Editions, but I never even bothered with the Jedi Quest series, which seems like a good thing considering what anakinfan said about Jude Watson's inability to separate Anakin from Vader.

 

I loved Jedi Apprentice, still do. While it's simple, it's fleshing out the existence of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, which were really a well designed duo in TPM.

Jedi Quest, being an AOTC tie-in series, goes a bit more for the feeling that something in the galaxy in going wrong. I also wouldn't say that Anakin is portrayed as evil evil evil in these books; but he's definitely portrayed as faulty faulty faulty. The funny thing is that Anakin's foil, Perfect Padawan Ferus Olin, didn't seem to be too favourable, since he's the boring overachiever and Anakin is, after all, the reader's focus.

Next is Last of the Jedi, which really does weird things with the Jedi mission formula, being a ROTS tie-in that needs to find Jedi missions without a surviving Jedi-Padawan pairing. With each consecutive series, you get to see the development of the galaxy. It's going as downhill as the prequels already show you; you really get the idea that the Empire is destroying places and people you thought were random wallpaper in the original JA series.

And then there's Rebel Storm (Alex Wheeler must be a pseudonym chosen to get new readers in, just like the books were designed to look like anything other than an unquiet epilogue to Last of the Jedi), which is not as much about the ANH crowd as it is about what the LotJ universe would look like 20 years later.

I'm not sure if I really would recommend hunting down all 49 books (including specials), but it sure did make sense to read them starting in 1999 up to, what was it, 2010?

And by the way, I think she's obviously more of an Obi-Wan fangirl. Qui-Gon factors in because the world was best when those two were together. But having Ben Kenobi shave his beard to go undercover after ROTS, destroying the visual progression of the saga... that's a serious Ewan McGregor crush rivaling that of Karen Miller.

 

I'm pretty sure the Rebel Force books weren't written by Jude Watson. I don't think that's even her real name.

 

Apparently it's Judy Blundell.