Review: I, Jedi (Audio Version)

By Alberto Calderón

Spoilers!

Former Corellian Security Force officer and current Rogue Squadron X-Wing pilot Corran Horn’s life is upended when his wife goes missing. Should he follow his heritage and train as a Jedi or stay true to his training and use his investigative skills to find Mirax.

Legends book I, Jedi by Michael A. Stackpole was released in 1998 and is now getting the Essentials Legends Collection audio treatment with seasoned voice actor Marc Thompson again taking the reins bringing all the characters to life.

Told completely in first person, I, Jedi follows Corran Horn as he returns to Coruscant after a successful mission defending the New Republic against pirate attacks just to be assailed by a vision of his wife, Mirax, in danger and screaming his name. After speaking with Rebellion heroes General Wedge Antilles and Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, Corran learns that Mirax had been taken by a pirate gang called the Invids and their leader, Leonia Tavira and decides to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and train as a Jedi in Luke’s newly formed Jedi Academy.

Under the alias of Keiran Halcyon, the first half of the book follows Corran Horn and other new recruits as they help Luke form his Jedi training academy in Yavin IV. After weeks of training and failed attempts at lifting rocks, Keiran Halcyon finds his gifts in the Force with abilities that allow him to project visions into others minds. An ability that will serve him well throughout the book, but if you ask me and if you thought that Jedi Mind Tricks were borderline dark side use since it helped the Jedi manipulate their victims, Force Sight and Force Illusion take it to the next level.

“I had intended to start dating her before her husband showed up.”
General Wedge Antilles

As always the sound production in these Star Wars audio books have nothing to envy from the movies and TV shows. Listening through headphones outside when the birds of Yavin IV were singing and chirping had me looking up at the trees as I thought they were real birds. Not to mention the heroic music that blares during the Jedi training sessions. Marc Thompson delivers another excellent performance, even if one or two of the voices were a bit distracting for my taste.

When a murder happens at the academy, Keiran falls back on his spy training and realized that the spirit of four thousand year old dead Sith Lord Exar Kun had returned and taken over the bodies of Luke’s students.

With appearances by Han Solo, Leia Organa Solo,and Mara Jade, the sequences in the Jedi Academy were my favorite but as this section was just expanding on the stories told in Star Wars: The Jedi Academy trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson, the ending to that storyline was pretty uneventful. Even though Keiran discovers that Exar Kun loses some of his powers every time he uses the dark side to take over a new body and he devices a plan to battle the dark lord, Exar’s final demise at the hands of the rest of the Jedi students, Han Solo’s search for fallen Jedi Kyp Durron, Luke waking up from Exar’s attack, and subsequent search, with a reformed Kyp, for the Sun Crusher all happen “off-screen”, it make some of the time spent on Yavin IV and the new Jedi Academy almost as a why were we here anyways. To make this decision worse, something similar happens towards the end of the book.

After becoming disillusioned with the way Luke Skywalker ran the academy and his black and white views about good and evil, he decides to drop the Keiran Halcyon cover and become Corran Horn again. He visits his step-grandfather in Corellia and listens to stories about Corran’s Jedi grandfather, Neeja Halcyon. But instead of continuing his search for his wife, he decides to go and have a fun night out in the town with his granddad. It was a bit frustrating how the search for Mirax kept taking a backseat to everything else in Corran’s life and what appeared to be his constant lusting over every woman he met, including trying to justify sleeping with Leonia Tavira if it helped rescue his wife.

After a bit, Corran decides that the best way to find Mirax was to infiltrate the Invids and find Leonia and starts this process by becoming a Tri-Fighter pilot for one of the pirate crews that made up the Invids. Even though he did his best to hide his Jedi powers, during an altercation with rival Remart, Corran comes close to falling to the dark side and beats Remart close to death.

There’s a fun bit when Corran basically becomes Jedi Batman and goes out in the night, looking for crime in order to stop it and creates terror among the pirates regarding a Ghost Jedi or like he liked to say “Doom has come to Courkrus“.

During a fight against the Jensaarai, the dark side users that helped Leonia, Corran, with the help of Luke Skywalker, are able to rescue Mirax and escape the Star Destroyer as Leonia made a run for it.

Even though he found Mirax, we only get to spend like half a chapter with her, which was mostly an action sequence, before adding a new plot line regarding the Jensaarai and how the Jedi had wronged them. Similar to the ending of the Jedi Academy story, the search for Invid leader Leonia Tavira, which was heralded as a thorn in the New Republic’s side, ends with a throwaway line in the epilogue saying that some other officer from the New Republic will probably continue the search for her.

And that’s what was frustrating about this twenty hour audiobook. The three plot beats that are set up at the start; the search for Mirax, trouble at Luke’s Jedi Academy, and the hunt for Leonia, all end unceremoniously.

Overall: 2.75 out of 5 Probe Droids

Thanks to Penguin Random House Audio for the advance review copy. I, Jedi Essential Legends Collection audiobook releases March 12, 2024