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Dooku Jedi Lost by Cavan Scott 7/10

Timeline wise, this is one of the earliest in the new Disney cannon for Star Wars. Unsurprisingly it's mostly about Dooku and how he stopped being a 'good' ancient space wizard and became a 'bad' one instead. Despite clearly being designed to be on TV rather than as a book, given that the book is full of script notes that reference a whole bunch of real life things, it's actually a really good filler for the events before we see Dooku get messed up by Palpatines' desire to replace a perfectly good student with Anakin Skywalker; an angry teenager that murders people with very little prompting. (This probably should have been dealt with sooner by the Jedi, but then the story would have been much shorter I guess.)

 

Although we get a little bit more information about Dooku and his relationship with Yoda in the animated series 'The Clone Wars', Jedi Lost really shows us just how the Jedi managed to screw up, at least from Dooku's perspective, and push one of their strongest members right into the waiting arms of Palpatine. It also explores the change of approach between his time training Jedi padawans and his time training his 'pet' assassin Ventress.

 

Overall, Cavan does a great job of getting the reader to feel empathy for Dooku and the struggles he goes through during his time with the Jedi while keeping him a hard and relentless character in the stories' present setting. The story is told though a mix of perspectives, properly beginning with a flashback to when Dooku first meets his sister and chases events through his communications with her while Ventress attempts to find her in the present time for her master. With a huge cast of characters, Cavan really gets to work his way through a number of personality types, delving into some of the more rebellious and alarming personalities of the Jedi order. In fact, from the number of rouge elements from just this book, it wouldn't have been so surprising if the real reason Yoda went off to live in a swamp was to get away from people causing havoc while doing what was 'right'.

 

If you can get over the fact that you are basically reading a script, (something that I found to be a little jarring at times)  and like Star Wars,  I would really recommend giving this a read. 

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