Reviews Books The JC Lit Reviews Special: INQUISITOR: RISE OF THE RED BLADE (Spoilers)

The Imperial Inquisition, what a show! Here's the review thread for Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade by Delilah Dawson. Go ahead and give it a score on the 1-10 scale, as long as you have read or listened to the entire book. Reviews are not necessary but are encouraged, but if you don't write them I might post helicopter-saber gifs everywhere to make up for it.

 

Finished this a few days ago. Probably the best written from a technique perspective Dawson Star Wars book that I have read so far and therefore probably also my favorite Dawson Star Wars book to date.

However, while Dawson's actual writing craft was strong, I found Iskat to be the one PT era Jedi who probably exceeded Anakin in whininess so I found it hard to sympathize with how nothing and nobody could ever make her happy (she wanted guidance but not from the people who offered it to her, etc.) and I felt the book leaned too strongly into its anti-Jedi narrative that it became a bit tiresome and tedious.

6 out of 10 from me.

 

Inquisitors- the mere mention of their name strikes fear and despair into the hearts of any who might get in their way or worse, might find themselves a target of theirs. But where did they come from? What led these former Knights to pick up the red blades? We find out the story of one inquisitor in this novel from Delilah Dawson, no stranger to writing about opportunistic baddies in the GFFA, and we get a great look at just how a Jedi under the wrong circumstances can fall so far from the light.

We follow Iskat Ikaris form her time as a padawan to her time among the Inquisitorious, and all throughout she travels the bumpiest of roads. Apprenticed to an aloof master, she tries her best to be a dutiful padawan, but chasing down trinkets doesn’t feel like the right path for Iskat. This is a common theme throughout the novel, as Iskat continually feels like people around her aren’t letting her tap into her full potential, first as a peacekeeping warrior and then as a fearsome Jedi hunter. And when opportunity strikes as the Clone Wars begin, after a brief stint on the battlefield Iskat is grounded for almost the entirety of the war. All the while she wonders what is wrong with her, why the Jedi Council think it’s better for her to remain in the temple and avoid active duty; and it’s a relatable situation- Iskat realizes she has a proclivity for combat, and unlike most of her fellow Jedi she doesn’t have many compunctions about getting her hands dirty to bring down the enemy. She yearns to be as useful to the Jedi as possible, and chafes at these seemingly unfair admonishments, all because she has a few little anger issues. You can probably see where this is going, and when Iskat finally returns to the field Order 66 is issued and she’s given the choice to throw off the shackles of the Jedi and join a group where she can finally be her true self. It’s no surprise that she accepts after years of feeling like an outcast among the Jedi, after years of feeling this sense that she’s meant to be a fighter, even a killer. Of course the one friend she did have at the temple, the one person she could ever open up to about her true feelings, turned out to be an agent of the Sith, so there’s some ambiguity on whether Iskat is naturally inclined toward the dark or if the circumstances she found herself in pushed her that way. Dawson makes the bold choice of having Iskat be the only POV character for the book, so we’re right alongside her as she loses faith in the Order and answers the call of the dark side. It’s either a brilliant study of psychopathy or a terribly tragic tale of a failed system that has no room for anyone that doesn’t fit into a “normal” mold.

Dawson does a great job of walking a fine line between making Iskat sympathetic while also making it clear how negative a toll her path is having on herself and everyone around her. It’s totally understandable why Iskat so readily joins the Inquisitorious, but it’s also understandable why the Jedi trod so carefully with her, especially after we learn everything about her mother and the similar issues she faced with her training and subsequent failure to find a place with either the Jedi or her birth family. It’s ironic that Iskat feels like the only inquisitor who didn’t need coercion to join their ranks when it’s so obvious by the end that the dark side has sunk its talons deep into her and is only enabling her darkest desires. It’s a slippery slope once a lightsider has tasted the dark, and Iskat get plenty of opportunities to step back and reflect on her actions and realize how they are anything but the right choices, but the combination of this dark influence and her own hubris seal her fate, and they are ultimately what lead to her downfall at the hands of Darth Vader.

There’s a lot of other great characters in the book. We also follow the story of another Jedi-turned-inquisitor, Tualon, who has his own issues during the war. Then there’s the Sith agent Heezo, who seems like the most level-headed person in Iskat’s life for most of the story, but once his affiliation is revealed in retrospect there are observable signs that he was pushing her a little toward the dark; I had my suspicions about him as he kept showing up, so even though I figured out the twist he was a cool character to include, since he represents how dangerous the dark side can be when all he was doing was encouraging Iskat to follow her gut over the advice of the Jedi Council. There’s some interesting Jedi characters introduced here, from Iskat’s first master whose aloofness played a big role in heightening Iskat’s insecurities, to Klefan Opus, Iskat’s master’s master, who while being a very straight-laced Jedi is also capable of holding his own in the big wild galaxy. And of course there’s some good uses of existing Jedi, from various council members to Jocasta Nu and an offscreen appearance of the infamous Pong Krell. Dawson weaved a great narrative drawing on a swath of stories, from the Darth Vader comics that introduced Iskat and Tualon to other stories of the era like Brotherhood and The Clone Wars.

I give Rise of the Red Blade a 9.2 out of 10 for a fascinating look into the fall of a different kind of Jedi, which adds a ton of depth to a previously one-off character.