Book Review – The Empire Strikes Back

The Empire Strikes Back by Donald F. Glut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Back in the early 1980s, KC’s Fine Arts Theater was in the same strip mall with Rainy Day Books. Finding myself with nothing to do between pictures in a James Bond double feature, I strayed down to the bookstore and bought a copy of this book. Which I subsequently forgot and left behind at the end of the second movie. So finding a copy more than 40 years later is probably a personal record for length of time taken to finish reading a book. The text itself is standard fare for a quick novel based on a pre-production copy of the script, but it turns into a fun “spot the difference” between book and movie (for starters, in this version Yoda is blue). The illustrations are Ralph McQuarrie’s concept sketches, so they’re good without being purpose-made for the print edition. Fans of the movie may get a kick out of this, but fans of literature most likely won’t.

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