I often have wondered why people read the novelizations of movies they already saw. My experience with the novels for "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones," though, showed me that much can be gained. Frankly, if the film "Attack of the Clones" had been made the way the book was written, it would have been a far better movie. So I set out reading "The Clone Wars" with this hope in mind. Having seen the movie several times, I hoped to gain something useful out of reading the novelization. I was not disappointed. It's clear that the bulk of this story should be the Battle of Teth. Whereas the movie spends nearly equal time on Christophsis and Tatooine as on Teth, the novel wisely accelerates both the Christophsis opening and the Tatooine conclusion (nearly skipping over the Coruscant tidbits entirely) in favor of focusing more on the central tale of Teth. I found this focus to be very effective. The biggest selling point for the novel, though, comes from its insight into each character. Traviss loves to lace dialog with the thoughts of the key participants. This gives us an excellent glimpse into each characters emotions and motivations. I found this very useful with Rex especially. In the film and subsequent TV series, we only get to know Rex from his dialog. This novel shows what goes on beneath the bucket and I love it! Another refreshing development is the revealed dual nature of Palpatine. Since many of the earlier Clone Wars novels preceded the release of Episode III, the publishers preferred to treat us like children and avoid the fact that Sidious and Palpatine were one and the same. Oh. Wait. SPOILER ALERT. Sorry, was that too late? It was so gratifying to see these scenes painted with the delicious spite and hatred of Sidious's thoughts woven within the smooth political language of Palpatine. It let us truly see what it was like for ol' Sheev to live that double life. If you want more of that, read Darth Plagueis. Lastly, while the book retained the awful AWFUL nickname "Skyguy," it was gracious enough to allow Ahsoka to call the galaxy's #1 droid by his actual name. That's right, none of that "Artoo-y" horror show from the film. Thank you, Karen Traviss! So pick this one up even - though you know the story. It's a great read and fills in some of the gaps in the action (not to mention the dialog) from its big-screen counterpart.

Karen Traviss does such a good job fleshing out and improving on the events of the film Star Wars: The Clone Wars, that this book seems like a totally different story, and a much better one at that. Getting into Anakin's head for the events of the film and seeing his hatred of Hutts was a great aspect of the book. Ahsoka is a great character in the novel, and this novel is what really made me like her. I don't know if I would have ended up liking her as much if I hadn't read this along with watching that original film. The clones in this book are more in line with Travis's Republic Commandos and I love it that way. Anakin's worry about Rex and hating having to leave him behind is a part of the book that doesn't appear at all in the film, but is a great improvement. All in all this is one of the best Star Wars books of the prequel era.

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