The series was on a downhill slope ever since Sacrifice pulled a Buffy Season Six and killed off Mara just to create OMGDrama! to the thing. Not coincidentally, my interest in Star Wars Literature began to wante around the same time, and I only got the remaining books in the sereis because of my status as an obsessive collector of all things Star Wars.
In closing, I'll just do a copy/paste on the review I did over @ the TF.N board:
The Good
Jacen is Dead: As someone who has been advocating this since I finished "Sacrifice", I'm glad to see that Denning didn't cop out and have him get redeemed or some other such nonsense. Of course, this being LOTF, Denning has to muddy that line by having it get out there that the whole point of Jacen going dark was to unite the galaxy against him (forgetting for the moment the so obvious fact that after NJO, the galaxy was already unified, and looked to be doing pretty well for itself by the end of DNT ...). Still, regardless of how it happened, he's still dead, and I couldn't have asked for anything better.
The Mandalorians Being Put In Their Proper Place: I love the Mandalorians. I love Karen Traviss' work on the Republic Commando series. So why didn't I like Revelation? Because it spent far too much of its 410 page space glorifying them and making Boba Fett out to be something that he really shouldn't have been. Thankfully, some semblance of the status quo is given here, since we have Boba Fett (who, I should point out, is making his first "not-in-a-book-written-by-Karen-Traviss" appearance since 2003...I think) making a token appearance (and thankfully getting the other side of the whole "Clone Trooper" thing) and getting some sort of resolution to his plot thread, with his and Mirta's exile from Mandalore.
The Bad
299 Pages Is Not Enough: In this regard, the book drew unfavorable comparison to Vision of the Future, the unofficial end to the Bantam era and clocking in at a hefty 694 pages (I've never actually finished reading the thing, despite several attempts to do so), and The Unifiying Force, clocking in at 529. I would imagine that the vast majority of books, whether they be Bantam or Del Rey, have clocked in at at least 350 or more, with only young reader books being less. My point is that 299 pages cannot hope to resolve all the plot stuff this book needs to do. Which leads me to my next point...
Too Much Plot Resolution Either Happens Offscreen or Not At All: The book essentially ends on page 281, the last eighteen pages devoted to wrapping up as much of the plots that have happened vicariously throughout the series, no doubt setting up the stuff we see in the Legacy comics (Jagged Fel somehow descending to Roan Fel, the Imperial Mission, etc.). At the same time, the Confederation-Alliance war, which has alternated beteween being the A and B plots for much of the series, pretty much ends because it's the end of the series, and everyone has to make nice. Um...yeah. I don't really understand this. Would you want to immediately want to make nice with someone you've hated for that long?
Daala as COS of the Alliance: Everything that can be said about this topic has already been said by other people (most notably Trip), so all I will do is add my voice to those saying how ludicrous a plot point this really is (especially since her appearance in both books is so brief and equally obvious in Revelaton to be a deux ex machina, not to mention the dumbest idea this series has ever produced, and considering this includes killing Mara, Pelleaon and Isolder for no discernable reason, that really says something.)
Speaking of that...
Yet Another Pointless Death: I do and forever will say that Chewbacca's death in "Vector Prime" was a necessary evil to the world of Star Wars literature. It needed to happen. That being said, nearly every other death since hasn't had the same impact to me, mostly because next on the sacrifical chopping block was Anakin, whose death immediately nullified the point of Chewie's. Mara didn't need to die to make Jacen evil. Pellaeon didn't need to die to make Tahiri evil. And Isolder didn't need to die to crush any hope that Jacen can be redeemed. (Of course, I'm tainted in that regard, seeing as how any such hope had died when I finished reading Sacrifice, and nothing was going to change that.)
Tahiri: I never read the Junior Jedi Knights series. But I have read the Force Heretic Trilogy, and her character development in that is probably the best I've seen in any SW literature I'd recently read. So to see that get flushed down the hole from Fury onwards wasn't exactly the greatest thing ever. (Then again, being aware of what's happened before has never been this series strong point.) Of course, some half-hearted attempt is made to paint her as not as bad as Jacen and to explain her prior characterization, but in the end it makes her 180 degree turn in Revelation even more ridiculous than it already was.
And that scene with her and Ben? Ick. Just...ick. Speaking of ick...
Thinly Veiled References to the Sex Life of Han and Leia: I mean, seriously. How old are Han and Leia now? Do we really need to know what they enjoy behind closed doors?
Total Extermination of the Next Generation: In the acknowledgements, Denning states how much he enjoys the Young Jedi Knights series. Well, you wouldn't have known it if you had read his work. Of the characters who have appeared in that series, only Jaina, Tenel Ka and Lowbacca have gotten out of the chronological work that followed (though Lowie makes so little appearance in this that he might as well have gotten killed off). And who wrote the books in which they died/went MIA/disappeared? Denning. Anakin, Lusa and Lyric gone in "Star By Star", Raynar in "The Swarm War" and Jacen and Zekk here. I just find it ironic tht he can profess his love of a certain series of books, and then go out of his way to mutilate the stars of that series in his own work, is all.
Jacen is Dead: Yeah, it's here, too. And here we get to what is probably the biggest problem of this book, if not the series as a whole. Jacen had to die. That was a given from at least "Sacrifice", if not earlier. However, the books between "Sacrifice" and "Invincible" were so slipshod at developing his character that any sort of plot resolution in this regard anticlimatic. It's the ultimate catch-22: he needs to die to provide this series with any sort of ending, but no matter what happened, it wasn't going to end well. This is, I think, expressed most clearly in the following passage:
"Jaina, we don't have time for this."
"So die already."
You see? At this point it was so clearly obvious that Jacen was going to buy the farm that I couldn't be convinced otherwise if I was sitting behind Denning watching him write the thing.
[ Click to attempt signal recovery... ]
