STAR WARS-THE NEW JEDI ORDER: BALANCE POINT

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Thursday, August 09, 2001

As the invading Yuuzhan Vong tear their way through the Alliance worlds on their way to Coruscant, the refugees from their previous attacks settle on Duro, a world nearly destroyed by industrial progress gone out of control. The temporarily estranged Han Solo and Leia Organa Solo are both on the planet, helping the refugees to restore the ecosystem, though neither of them knows it. Their daughter Jaina has just been injured in a Yuuzhan Vong attack, and their son Anakin is helping his uncle Luke Skywalker and his aunt Mara Jade Skywalker to find a missing Jedi apprentice. But the family member with the most on his plate is their other son, Jacen, who is now wrestling with the ethics of the Force and has foresworn it completely. As sabotage and enemy attacks threaten the unstable settlement, Jacen must come to grips with his worries over the appropriate uses of the Force and find the balance point.

As you might have guessed, there's a lot going on in this book, but a great deal of it is tying up loose ends from previous novels in the series the first hundred pages or so are devoted to bringing the reader up to speed. Problem is, it's a STAR WARS book, meaning that there's even more past history for the reader to catch up on. The events of BALANCE POINT take place some twenty years after the events of STAR WARS oh, pardon me, I meant EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE. So if you're a new reader coming into the series, even if you're the sort of fan that makes such pedantic distinctions between STAR WARS and EPISODE IV, you may want to start at an earlier point than this. There's also the lengthy and seemingly obligatory catalog of alien race names and reworkings of Earth phrases into Alliance-speak to wade through a personal favorite of mine occurs when Luke says he doesn't want to "send anyone on a wild yunax chase."

Apart from all this, though, BALANCE POINT provides a few surprises. For one thing, the most interesting characters in this novel are the ones introduced in the book series, not the characters from the films. Sadly, the old-timers come across as caricatures of themselves. Luke is still painfully earnest after all these years, especially when he discovers his wife Mara is pregnant after a long illness; Han Solo is still the gung-ho captain who's better at revolution than intimacy; and Leia is still driven and independent. Apart from some interesting character development on Leia's part, the real show-stealers are the kids. Tyers does an excellent job of making us care about Anakin, Jacen, and Jaina almost as much as we did about their elders, and since Jacen's ethical dilemma forms the central focus of the book, that's a necessary thing.


The Yuuzhan Vong also make fascinating villains, in some ways rivaling the good Lord Vader himself. An alien race devoted to pain and to cleansing the universe of the abomination of technology, the Vong use biological creatures for everything, from ships to guns to torture devices. They're exactly the sort of creepy-crawly creatures that any right-minded person would want to take up the good fight against, which makes Jacen's struggle with the Force an even more urgent concern.

Not everything is resolved here, of course it's part of a book series, and much like the film series which spawned it, the endings are meant to leave you wanting more. In that sense, the book succeeds. Tyers ties up several previous loose ends and introduces several new plot strands that sound even more intriguing than the ones she's covered here, leading to a sense of real anticipation. But the main plot strand in this novel that should have been resolved satisfactorily isn't. Jacen's dilemma ends in such a predictable and unsatisfying way that it's a good thing the rest of the book is here to make up for it. Luckily, the rest does make up for it, turning BALANCE POINT into a decent, but not stellar, novel.

STAR WARS-THE NEW JEDI ORDER: BALANCE POINT

Grade: B

Author(s): Kathy Tyers

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Price: $6.99