Not So Belated Book Review: Millennium Falcon

So for once, I've read a book more or less when it came out, and can review it more or less immediately. Wow.

This book definitively answers a question you may have had about the Falcon if you ever heard that old rumor that she used to be used by Jedi:

Did the Jedi (most particularly, Anakin Skywalker) ever actually use the Falcon?



Well, one of them sorta did, but not so much as a Jedi (and he didn't really fly or ride it, and he wasn't Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker)-it's a bit complicated.

The plot of the book is pretty unimportant (and pointless). The main point of the book is to establish the Millennium Falcon as not just another cool ship, but the cool ship, and-get this-a character in her own right.

As a continuous narrative, this could have been either boring (if executed typically or poorly) or very good (if executed masterfully). Instead, the history of the Falcon is slipped out to us in tiny drabbles and whatnot mixed in with the book's "real" plot. So you may or may not like it, based on how you feel about the Expanded Universe in general and matters such as the current post-Legacy of the Force novel series time period in particular.

If you decide that, based on either of those things, you don't want to read it, however, you'll be missing out on some moments that were, in my mind, pretty cool:

• The birth of the Falcon. (Mostly for the purposes of establishing that, hey, the Falcon was a pretty finicky and crazy ship to handle long before Han Solo got his hands on it.
• The buzz droid incident. (I dare not explain it, but for me it was the best single event in the book.)
• The time an albino circus rancor attacked the Falcon because it thought the Falcon was eating its animal friends.
• The time the Falcon wore tribal war paint.
• The most personal instance of the Falcon inflicting injury on Han Solo. (This time, it really wasn't Han's fault, although he really should have known better than to keep a live device of unknown origin in his pants pocket.)
• The prospective title of Leia's memoir.
• How the victim of the buzz droid incident got back at the Colicoids (the creators of the buzz droids and the droideka [the latter of which was modeled after their own anatomy] alike) for killing his business partners shortly before the buzz droid incident-and his revenge comes after stewing in jail for sixty-odd years. (Note that I forgot this when I wrote it up the first time 'round, and edited it in. This is sad, because it's perhaps the second best bit in the book.)

Decide for yourself if that sounds enticing.

-Signing off.