Reviews Books The JC Lit Reviews Special: MEDSTAR II: JEDI HEALER (spoilers)

I hope nobody minds my resurrecting a thread that is months old. But this is my favourite place to share my thoughts and read other peoples opinions about SW Novels. And I've only had the time to read this one upon completing college.

Medstar one was a book I had mixxed feelings about, and I decided to suspend judgement until I had read Healer. And I can say with a degree of confidence that I enjoyed the series now. The second book I'd consider the superior.

I started off having forgotten most of what happened in part one, but within the first number of pages the authors help jump start the memory. Everything that you'll be needing to know is kick-started, so that you wont be fishing around for any info.

Somewhere in the end of novel one it was anounced Barriss was there to discover what is going on with the Bota. Who stealing it and so on. Well I found it easy to loose site of that before, but in Healer it seems to be more clear right from the get go. Even Barriss finds herself asking questions like "Why am I here". Infact everyone starts asking themselves such questions, and the ironic reality of war starts to seap into this novel (assuming it hadn't already hit home).

I was never moved when Zan died. I didn't really care. Likewise the love relationship helped move the story along but I also didn't care. In 'Healer' it all seems to come to a head and it affected me as a reader, getting me more involved & interested then before. When Uli is the replacement and the way Jos has to deal with it; or when trying to decipher who the spy is, and could it be Tolk? This made for a more compelling half to the Medstar story.

In retrospect the whole side story of Kaird felt like watching a show like 24. You know how sometimes theres and interesting story and you'll keep watching for that, but then all the other filler crap (in this case Kaird) gets in there and you just have to keep tromping threw it, to get to the good stuff. Yeah...
But then something actually came of it. The info on Bota was revealed in his story first. So in the end it felt as though he had an important part of this story. But the deception and him stealing the ship, man I'm glad they didn't elaborate on his story once he escaped the blast.

Den was fun to follow nothing more or less. And I-Five helped keep things fun too. And I'm assuming he's the character that ties into 'Dark Rendezvous'.

Finally Barriss became alot more interesting too. Her internal struggle was no longer confined to deciding wheather she was going to fight that nutbar or not. Now she was having a struggle with Bota that we might compare to a drug addict, and it was very entralling for me. I enjoyed this book more then the first one, and the story benifits as a whole.

With that said I also had to simply skim with out trying to comprehend, all of those damn medical terms. Were Reaves & Perry former med students? Or are these words I should have learned in Highschool.

Overall, and based on my interest in this novel, I give Medstar Healer II: Jedi Healer
7/10

And now I get to read what everyone else thought!

 

I say 7.5/10. I was a really huge fan of the first MedStar to the point I avoided all spoilers for this novel.(only SW book I've done with that so far) None of the new characters really interested me that much. I still enjoyed I5 and Den Dhur, plus the last 80 pages made up for the rest of the book. So while Jedi Healer is enjoyable to read, it's a bit of a disapointment.

 

Counting 54 reviews: 421.8/54 = 7.81

 

i have it at my house would it not be good to read it without raeding number 1 of it first? r is it ok?

 

I read it and give it 4\10. It wasn't enough star wars and jedi too much on outside characters and a horrible ending anti-climatic.

 

I'm not quite sure what the difference is between the "review" threads and the "discssion" threads, so I'll just repost my comments made in the "discussion" thread, here:

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[i]Jedi Healer[/i] was one of the few times the PT-era books have really disappointed me. I greatly disliked the attempt to create a book around almost wholly original characters. To my mind, this is where the EU in general begins to go awry. I have no problem with additional stories built around main (or even secondary) characters seen in the films, but when the tie-in becomes more about the STAR WARS universe, and less about the STAR WARS characters, I begin to get uncomfortable with the EU. To be sure, there are times where it can work, but here the connection to the films was far too tenuous to be generally enjoyable. I think that one of the biggest problems for me was not only that the characters simply don't contribute to the saga in much of a meaningful way, but also that they were rather poorly drawn. Dialogue was a real weakness in this book--perhaps because the character motivations weren't, by and large, compelling. In particular the core love story, such as it was, played out more as a an episode of [i]General Hospital[/i] trying lamely to be [i]Romeo and Juliet[/i], rather than an even mediocre attempt to capture some of the fire of hospital relationships we see on, say, [i]E.R.[/i]. It mattered not at all to me whether they got together, and by the time I got to the sappy Epilogue, I positively thought I was lost in an episode of [i]Family Affair[/i].

Worse than this, though, was the sloppy handling of Bariss' character. After all, she's right on the cover, and, one would imagine, she's the star of the piece. She's at best a co-star--and this alone leads me to believe I was duped into forkin' out my $7.50. Things start out well enough in Chapter One, where we're treated to an imagining of the climactic events of The Approaching Storm from her perspective. I enjoyed this greatly, as it's a useful way to help us follow the character from background character in the movies, to co-star in a Clone Wars episode and a directly-referenced-by-film novel. Unfortunately, after this point, her dialogue might as well have come from a completely different character. There's seemingly little effort--or perhaps, little successful effort to give us the kind of "reserved mystic" we get (or, at least, [i]I[/i] got) from her earlier appearances. Perhaps by using someone who's a sort of second- or third-tier previously-established character, the authors hoped to get the best of both worlds--a "headliner" to sell the book, and someone who was largely a blank slate, and could be defined as they wished along with the other new characters they were making. And, maybe, if you haven't followed her character closely, you'll not notice anything wrong with the way they approach her. But there's just something far too casual, and at times almost flirtatious, about her that rings distinctly false. It is almost as if they wrote her as Padawan Any-Jedi. That, added to the fact that she takes too much of a back seat to the authors' own creations, leaves me really feeling cheated by her use in this book.

Having said that, there are times, largely not when the character speaks, when I feel like they've given her something interesting. Fairnes demands that I draw attention to her character's personal journey, which does add something that feels much like the character I've come to enjoy in other outlets. The crisis she faces, her "Jedi Trial", as it were, is for its final 10 pages at least, riveting stuff that "fits", and gives her passage into Knighthood a satisfyingly ironic twist. I don't think it's enough to justify the book as a whole, but the way in which she attains Knighthood does give the reader a fair chunk of change to think about.

Another annoying aspect of the book is something that I'm struggling to understand about my own personal tastes in EU fiction. While in one breath I do appreciate the bridge the authors attempt to make with [i]The Approaching

 

Counting 56 reviews: 428.8/56 = 7.66

 

10. Best book in the Clone Wars.

 

Counting 57 reviews: 438.8/57 = 7.70