A Must Read for Jedi Fans.....

If you are a Star Wars fan you will delight in the first of the Jedi Academy Trilogy dedicated to Luke Skywalker and his attempt to re-establish the Jedi order.

There is a lot of classic Star Wars action and characters with the scattered remains of the Empire thrown in just for fun.

The events in this book, and all three books, take place after Return of the Jedi but before the New Jedi Order series of books.

Absolutely excellent

This book started me reading, literally, 12 years ago. I was not a reader until one day I happened upon this book, since then I have read countless books. The book is interesting, adventurous and exciting. I have never read a book quite like it. There is a scene with a chase that had my heart pounding when they finally got away. The battles are very interesting, and the story takes the reader to many different places. The only qirk is that andersons puts 50 ties in his squadrons and 300 to an SD, this is incorrect, there are twelve fighters to a squadron, and an Imperial class holds only 72. Despite this detail, this is one of the greatest books I've ever read. The only other star wars novel that comes close is The Courtship of Princess Leia. This book deserves 6 stars but I can only give it five. One final note for those comparing it to Zahn's book, Timothy Zahn had most the Imperial equipment left at the end of his book, and tactically this last battle made no sense.

Jedi Knights of a new generation.....

It is a time of transition in the galaxy. A few years after the Battle of Endor, even though the evil Empire now only controls a quarter of its vast territory and Grand Admiral Thrawn's campaign to destroy the fledgling New Republic has been defeated, the former Rebels still face many challenges -- and many foes -- as they strive to restore peace and justice to the galaxy.

Thrawn's campaign (chronicled in the 1991-93 trilogy by Timothy Zahn) and subsequent events not only prolonged the continuing conflict between the New Republic and the dying Empire, but they also highlighted the Republic's biggest weakness -- the absence of a strong Jedi Order to help protect its values and its citizens. Where once there had been 10,000 Jedi Knights in the days before Palpatine's rise to power and the demise of the first Galactic Republic, only Luke Skywalker remains as a full-fledged Jedi.

Luke, of course, has been trying to train his twin sister Leia in the ways of the Force, but her duties as a member of the Provisional Council and her brother's recent experiences -- including a fall to the dark side and almost a repetition of their father Anakin's mistakes -- have impeded her progress as a Jedi apprentice. Leia's marriage to Han Solo and the birth of three potential Jedi children also demand her attention, so Luke must look elsewhere for Jedi apprentices.

Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Search is the first of a three-book cycle that chronicles Luke Skywalker's endeavors to set up a new Jedi Academy and to restore the order of Jedi Knights. With very few records left over after the Great Purge inflicted by the late Emperor and his own father, Darth Vader, Luke must not only scour the galaxy for data on the training of new Knights, but he also needs to find new candidates to teach.

Even as Luke gets approval from the New Republic to set up a Jedi academy, new challenges and old enemies arise. On Kessel, Han Solo and Chewbacca are captured by Moruth Doole, a cunning mine official who now runs the entire spice mine complex -- and the individual that had, several years before, tipped off the Imperial tariff authorities that Solo was hauling a load of spice destined for crime boss Jabba the Hutt. The Millennium Falcon had been boarded, but not before Han had jettisoned the spice...which had saved him and Chewbacca from a stint in Imperial detention blocks but not, unfortunately, from a debt to Jabba.

Elsewhere, a new threat emerges as Admiral Daala, the beautiful but ruthless woman (and only female flag officer in the Imperial fleet) in command of a squadron of Star Destroyers assigned to protect a top-secret research facility, prepares to unleash a new campaign against the Rebels who killed her paramour and destroyed her beloved Empire. With her four massive warships and several powerful super weapons at her disposal, Daala bides her time, waiting for the proper moment to start her devastating strike....

Anderson, a technical editor and writer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and author of other non-Star Wars novels, has become one of the most prolific authors of Star Wars Expanded Universe material. He loves the universe created by George Lucas in his five films (even though some of the Jedi concepts here are radically different from data established in the two prequels released in 1999 and 2002) and knows the characters and situations well enough to write interesting and entertaining "further adventures" novels, comic book series, and short stories set "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...."