The Unifying Force

James Luceno authors the final chapter to the New Jedi Order series, and given his flair for drama and action, he was a good choice to bring this long tale to an exciting conclusion. As expected, our familiar heroes, Luke, Han, Leia, Mara and others, acquire a new understanding of the Force and bring an end to the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. Ok. Now what? Will anyone get to take a vacation now?

Published in hardcover by Del Rey. The hardcover comes with a bonus CD-ROM containing the first New Jedi Order novel, Vector Prime by R. A. Salvatore, in eBook format.

Finally, it ends.

In all seriousness, I've enjoyed the NJO series - I don't want to talk about my feelings on the whole thing here, but I posted a blog entry on it at http://theorangemonkey.livejournal.com/176980.html.

So, anyways, The Unifying Force. In this volume we see an end to the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong; there are lots of big actiony scenes as a result, and because it's the last volume in the series, absolutely every character that's been in the series so far shows up. The result of this is that there isn't much character growth or quiet moments in this book, but as most of the individual character arcs have been wrapped up already, that's not too much of a complaint.

In retrospect, the series ends in the only way that it really could have, but it's done in a satisfying way - a large part of the concluding message is “our enemies are more like us than we ever gave them credit for”, which is the kind of moral that could have easily come across as cheesy, but Luceno does a good job of preventing it from being so.