In the opening minutes of Revenge of the Sith, Obi-Wan Kenobi mentions some business on Cato Neimoidia. Mike Chen wrote the business on Cato Neimoidia. What makes Brotherhood worth reading is that he used the gap for the one thing the prequels genuinely skipped: the handover from master and apprentice to something the Jedi Order has no procedure for.
The case
An explosion devastates Cato Neimoidia, a world the Trade Federation has kept precariously neutral, and the Republic is being blamed. Obi-Wan goes alone as an investigator, because sending an army would confirm the accusation. Anakin — newly knighted, and told explicitly to stay out of it — goes anyway. The novel is therefore two men working the same crisis from opposite ends without permission to coordinate, which is a good detective structure and a better relationship structure.
The knighting is the subject
Chen’s central insight is that promotion breaks things. Anakin has spent a decade being told what to do by a man he loves and resents in roughly equal measure, and the moment that ends, neither of them knows what they are to each other. Obi-Wan keeps reaching for the teacher register and hearing how it lands. Anakin keeps proving he does not need it, at length, to nobody. It is a small, precise, entirely convincing piece of character work and the films have no room for it at all.
Mill Alibeth
A young Force-sensitive Neimoidian who feels other people’s pain so acutely that she cannot bear to be trained. She is the book’s cleanest device: Anakin, of all people, is the one who can talk to her, because he is the one who understands wanting to fix everything you can feel. That the Order has nothing useful to offer her is the quiet indictment underneath the plot.
Ventress
Asajj Ventress appears, briefly and well. Chen writes her as a professional who has met Anakin before and has taken notes, which is the correct register for a character who spent five television seasons being underestimated. See the dossier.
Where it strains
The mystery plot itself is thin — the culprit is not hard to guess and the investigative procedure is mostly a delivery system for conversations. Chen’s prose is clean but unmemorable, and the Neimoidian political material never becomes as interesting as the book seems to think it is.
Who should read it
Anyone who cares about Anakin and Obi-Wan and has been let down by how little the films show of them actually working. Read it after Attack of the Clones and before the Clone Wars material proper; it needs no television at all.
