Note: Due to having friends who have yet to read this book, any spoilers will be very minor and not greatly affect the book.

Dark Disciple (DD) is perhaps the hardest book for me to review. This is namely because I don't know what I thought of the book.

Is it the worst Star Wars book I've ever read? No.

Is it the best Star Wars book I've ever read? No.

But I'll start with some positives. This will be a pretty short section because I can't expand on the positives without spoilers, but I'll list off a few. The end made me cry, the action scenes made sense and drew me in, Count Dooku's portrayal was awesome, and I was shipping Vos and Ventress by the end of the book. The plot was also very creative and well-thought-out, and I personally didn't get confused at all throughout the book as it related to the story itself.

However, there is one extremely major flaw that rips a big hole in the quality of this book: this story was never adapted to being a novel. Let me explain. DD was originally a fairly large story arc in CW08, but when CW08 was cancelled, this story had to be novelized. The story would have worked better as an arc in Clone Wars, and this shows in 3 main arwas

1.) Not enough internal narrative. The book relies very heavily on external action for the character development and romance - too heavily, in fact. In my view, displaying emotion is all a balance of narrative, action, and dialogue. This book lacked enough narrative to draw me into the romance till close to the end, which is not how a romance novel should be. I did think that both Vos and Ventress had character development individually, but their romance? Not so much.

2.) Not enough buildup to the first kiss. This is a crucial aspect of romance novels. By the time the couple kisses, I should be saying something like "YES, IT'S ABOUT TIME!" With Vos and Ventress, however, I was confused. I felt like they were only barely starting to have feelings for one another, and that's usually not enough to initiate the kiss. This, combined with the above flaw, greatly weakened their relationship and left me not getting a sense of chemistry till close to the end - which is really not how a romance should work.

3.) And this may just be me, but....the relationship between Ventress and Grievous. (We all remember "ARC Troopers"....just kidding.) I don't want to spend too much time on this part, especially since he (thankfully) plays a very minor role in the story, but I feel like it's worth mentioning. Without delving into spoilers for Clone Wars, there was a time when Grievous harmed Ventress in a very....personal way. This gives them a lot of history when they part for the final time in CW08. But you would hardly even know that during their battle in DD. And mind you, this offense was quite major and makes Ventress bitter in other parts of the book. Watch the episode "Massacre" to see what I'm referring to. They had a chance at great character development and tension, and they threw that out the window.

I think that these are very major flaws caused by the intent of making this an arc in Clone Wars. They focused too much on action and dialogue, and it caused the story's quality to suffer. I'd still recommend it because there are quite a few positives, but I also think this is a fairly weak romance and works better as an action story about Ventress.