"There we have it… chronologically speaking this is the first read you get in the New Expanded Universe. I was hesitantly excited to read this, as I have some sentiments towards the objectively mixed bag of pre-Clone Wars comics. There were some great ones, some truly horrible ones… and many so mediocre I was glad the Clone Wars came and shook up this universe.
"Regrettably I have to say, that this second attempt at making it right, is as a mixed bag as what came before it. Although the art is gritty and great, seldom do the characters look like the actors portraying them. That is not always a very bad point, but with good Star Wars fiction I can normally hear the actors voices when reading their lines… here it was not so. Neither Obi Wan’s nor Anakin’s characters were truly captured and as the story moved along I understood that all of this was written more as a tool, a means to get from start to finish, rather than a work of passion for the characters that were on this road.
"Yes, the ending had a nice twist, nothing major, just enough to justify a slightly higher rating but overall this was nothing special. A showcase of lack of subtlety in parallels between the major characters and the secondary ones and an attempt at feeding the story of the movies with additional details. And here I can say, that the one highlight of this book is a not completely successful attempt at showing the origin of the friendship between Palpatine and Anakin. Something that truly requires to be much deeper explored."

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