Junior Jedi Knights 1: The Golden Globe by Nancy Richardson (1995)

 The Golden Globe

Every one of these covers is great

Here we go with the second round of middle grade books. Since these are all of about 40 ereader pages long each, I'm not sure I'm going to cover each individually, but I figured I'd at least hit the first one.

Summary: Anakin Solo meets Tahiri Veila at Luke's Jedi Academy. They have dreams (and Anakin hears voices) about going rafting into the jungle. They sneak out of the academy, head down a river, and find a Massassi temple. They explore inside and find big magical GOLDEN GLOBE, and a furry mascot Jedi Master. They head back to the academy to get chewed out by Luke, but vow to find more about the globe later.

What it introduces:

Tahiri Veila: Anakin meets his new best friend shortly after arriving at the academy. In classic 90s kid lit tradition, she's the loud/impulsive one to his quiet nerdiness (almost the same dynamic as Jack and Annie from Magic Tree House.)

Ikrit: A Kushiban (dog-rabbit) Jedi Master who is waiting for Force sensitive children to come break the curse trapping the Massassi Children in the Golden Globe

Commentary: Right from the start, Junior Jedi Knights gets two things right that the Jedi Prince books had issues with. First, instead of cramming a child character in to follow the adult cast around, it fully revolves around a pair of children (Anakin and Tahiri). Second, it actually fits into the canon. From a meta perspective, the goal of the series is to set up Anakin as his own character (having previously been sort of the extra Solo kid), tell us more about the Jedi Academy, and introduce a few other characters who will be moving forward with him. The Young Jedi Knights series that I'll start next week will do something similar for the older Solo twins, and was targeted at a more teen audience. While it's hard to overstate the work done by the Thrawn trilogy in establishing the EU, it's really going to turn into the Solo kids' story over time.

Prose wise, they're pretty rough, even for a kids books. Choppy, repetitive, and jumpy in equal parts. Sometimes you'll read a sentence that feels completely repetitive, and other times a major plot point will seem to blaze by in five words.

Richardson really likes describing character's eyes. It's like an anime fanfic, it's always in the first paragraph introducing a character. Also, everything is in metric. It's an interesting choice for for an American kids series (although Star Wars as a whole is mostly metric). 

I think Tahiri gets the first rendition of the sand monologue, talking about how its gritty and sticks between your toes. 

Jacen and Jaina's personalities seemed to be flipped. Jacen is the impulsive one accord to Anakin. 

As with all kids books, you have to somehow get the adults out of the way. In this case, the kids mostly sneak out, but are stopped by Artoo. I like the use of Artoo here (he's definitely inclined to let he kids get away with some degree of mischief, and ill equipped to physically stop them), but he eventually actually helps them sneak out of the academy, which seems like a stretch.

Anakin basically Jedi Mind Tricks Tahiri into swimming better so she won't drown, which feels kind of Dark Sidey, but isn't really mentioned.

All in all, this feels more like a short story (revolving around the single incident of them finding a globe) than a complete short novel. I feel like the Jedi Prince books felt a little more long-plotted. I read this whole series in elementary school as they came out, so fun to get back to them.