Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover

You’ve waited years, maybe even decades, to find out how and why Darth Vader became the towering, jet black, helmeted villain that he was in the Star Wars classic trilogy.  Now that Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is finally here, why worry about sold out tickets or long lines at the theaters? Thanks to Matthew Stover’s novelization of the epic film, your worries are over. 

Stover’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is over 400 pages long, so it should come to no surprise that it is much more than a simple retelling of the script. Neither the book nor the movie acts as a substitute for the other, as the book provides extra scenes and background material, while the movie of course gives visual clues and splendor. 

From the start, Stover’s book asserts itself as a quality literary work in its own right. There’s a poetic quality in Stover’s writing that is becoming more and more rare in mainstream writing. He begins each of the novel’s three sections with reflections on the nature of light and dark, and then uses a similar reflection to “foreshadow” Luke Skywalker’s role as a “new hope” in the original Star Wars. Stover begins the novelization by neatly summing up the story that lies in the pages ahead: 

“It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred lines between our best and our worst” (i). 

But most significantly, he explains why the Star Wars myth captures generation after generation, any age, any gender: 

“A strange thing about stories–
“Though this all happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here” (i).