Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace by Terry Brooks

I love reading novelizations. I cherish getting access to more internal information that is left unexplored in the visual medium of the movies. Seeing how movement can be detailed, additional flourishes added to enhance my remembered experience with this series of films. I eat most things Star Wars related up, and this book was no different.

Seeing the way Anakin holds so much love for his mother makes me emotional. This is just a boy, and it hurts watching his bright eyes become faded with pain over just the events of this book/movie’s story. It is understandable, when reading this, why losing her right before he could get back to her sent him spiraling into the darkness.

”Her lank, dark hair was beginning to gray, and her once graceful movements had slowed. But he thought she was beautiful and brave. He thought she was perfect.”

Lance me in half why don’t you, OW!!

And his connection to the droids, to C-3PO and R2-D2!! He is so gentle and so kind!! I want to tear myself apart, Anakin goes through so much and seeing him here at the beginning of his journey, knowing what is coming, is pure pain for me (in the best of ways, in the way that keeps me reading books).

”Which ones are the best, See-Threepio?” he asked. He’d given it a number the night before, choosing three because the droid made the third member of his little family after his mother and himself.

Anakin has been my focus here, because really the prequels are the tale of Ani’s despair, but we get similar insights into Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon. Which I love also, seeing their semi-abrasive master/padawan bond because they view things so similarly but also so differently. But they care about each other so deeply. The death has taken my breath away every way I’ve read it, including Claudia Gray’s Master and Apprentice.

”You will be a great Jedi, my young Padawan. You wil make me proud.”

We even get to see some glimpses of Maul’s feelings here, and it makes me wish for a novel from his point-of-view. But man, I really love the prequels, I love this space opera of a franchise, and I’ll get to the rest of these novelizations soon!