Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 stars"Charming to the last" - with spoilers
Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2014
As another reviewer put it, “Tarkin is methodical and not action packed, just like the character.” Out of my five favorite Star Wars books three of them were authored by James Luceno; unfortunately Tarkin didn’t quite make the list. Not that Tarkin is a bad book by any means, it was as well written and detailed as Luceno’s other SW entries, it’s just not near as captivating as I’ve found most of his other works to be; plus it doesn’t help that the main character isn’t terribly exciting and the book is short enough that it probably just barely breaks out the novella mold. Honestly, I thought the scenes where Vader and Tarkin team up to be the highlight of the book.
The infamous Grand Moff is an interesting-enough character who has finally been given his due attention, and the book did a great job of showing that he’s not omniscient like a few previous SW villains (such as Thrawn). Luceno genuinely does Tarkin justice for the most part here, but sadly he’s one of the only known characters that feel authentic to their on-screen personae; Dooku was done well in flashbacks (probably because he’s very similar in personality), but Vader and Palps was hit-and-miss IMO. The pacing was building nicely to an encouraging conclusion, until the chapter detailing where Tarkin’s ship got its name brought it to an abrupt halt, causing what was left of the story to fall a bit flat. There’s also some decent insights into the workings of the Empire’s upper-echelons.
Despite all that; however, the little things (or dare I say nitpicks) stood out to me more than the book’s many positive attributes. For one thing, the main plot relies on an incredibly contrived sequence of events in order to work. Sending Vader and Tarkin to investigate a horde of communication equipment was pretty weak, and is like the equivalent of having the secretary of defense and a joint chief of staff personally go to a storage warehouse. Also, the antagonists of the book, who are strangely enough the good guys, easily procure a highly advanced ship that they only have vague knowledge of. This begs the questions why Tarkin alone has such a nice ship, one seemingly straight from Star Trek, while Vader still uses one from his Anakin days, and if Tarkin is so smart why aren’t there any failsafes to combat situations like this, either internally or externally?
There’s more to this list but ultimately while Tarkin was informative and interesting I didn’t find it as fun and as worthwhile a read as the only other entry in the so-called new EU to date, A New Dawn. Even casual fans will enjoy the several references to The Clone Wars animated series, as well as a few honorable mentions from the old EU, but to me this book felt rushed as so much more could’ve been included to fully round out this iconic character. I would recommend this primarily to SW fans unless unfamiliar terms aren’t too bothersome.