So, yeah, Star Wars books. Whenever I go to Amazon to dig up my book link, I inevitably see a few reviews that other people have written on whatever the particular book is. And as far as Exile and the previous books in the Legacy of the Force go, the reviews seem one and all to lament that there’s not enough action in the series. And from a certain perspective that’s true. Lightsabers have been wielded aplenty, but the space battles have been rare at best, and if one is reading for the looming civil war between Corellia and her allies against the Galactic Alliance, I can see where that would be disappointing. Although you’d think that the fact that the stalemate has broken and the escalations have begun would be enough to satisfy people.

Anyhow, that’s not important. What is important is that I’m pretty sure these people have pretty solidly missed what the series is actually about, and this civil war isn’t it. What it is is a full-on Greek tragedy, pitting parents against children, brothers against sisters, and so on. It’s a very deliberate tale because you have to set up every aspect of the tragedy just so. The civil war? That’s just a pretext-slash-backdrop for the important events. Of course, now that I’ve defended the series for a paragraph or two, I have to admit that the plot dragged a fair bit more than in previous books. That is, big events occurred in the story; the civil war has reached its decision point past which peace is no longer an option, and the two principle characters have passed their own critical decision points as well. But the small events were a lot less epic-feeling than they have been in the previous books, and it’s hard not to be disappointed by that, no matter how pleased I am with the overall story progress.