Still stranded on the obscure planet Lanteeb, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi are forced to take refuge in a town whose villagers are struggling to even survive.  At the same time, they still are faced with the daunting task of finding a way to destroy Lok Durd’s devastating bioweapon.  But they will face many obstacles on their journey, their boundaries being stretched to the very limit…

Does Karen Miller’s Siege live up to her previous two books?  Let’s find out as I review the last book in the Clone Wars series.

Going into Siege, I immediately noted how well it flowed with Stealth.  Miller had no problem meshing the two books together, which I certainly appreciated because that’s one thing I always look for in books; writing that flows very nicely.  Her writing, so far at least, does not fail in that aspect.

As I also said in my previous review of Stealth (I think, at least), she writes characters excellently.  Her character development and interaction is up there with some of the veteran EU authors already.  For example, we all know that Obi-Wan and Anakin have gone through a lot of hard adventures - going into a book like this, we also know that they’re both going to live.  But despite the fact that she has to work around a future that is already set in stone, Miller writes the journey that Obi-Wan and Anakin are going through so well, portraying their hardships, strain, etc, that you really believe they are in true danger.  This is sometimes difficult to do, but she managed to nail it, and that’s just one example of how well she can write character emotions and such.

There is one instance that I would classify someone as out-of-character, however.  It’s when Anakin wants to deprive the villagers of food and supplies just to prevent Durd from having slightly more damotite (the fuel behind the bioweapon, which Torbel is manufacturing for him).  Obi-Wan is the one who argues against this.  In light of how Anakin has acted for the rest of the book, and the previous books, it just seems as if he would’ve done anything possible to help the villagers more, and that certainly wouldn’t have helped them.  Heck, they didn’t even know what the damotite was being used for and he still wanted to do that.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand the desire, but for HIM it seemed off.

I also don’t think it seemed plausible that Rikkard, Torbel’s Head Minder, would give Anakin and Obi-Wan their secret pills (did anyone else think of Matrix when they read this scene?  Anyone?) to help prevent against damotite poisoning immediately, especially when they were so distrusting of the two.  They talked about how if any other villages discovered their secret, they would go to great lengths to steal it, so…. Give the two complete strangers the pills?  Okay.  That’s definitely logical.

Moving on, I have to admit that sometimes the book drags on a bit, getting slightly boring.  This is mostly the case with the Torbel story (Torbel being the village Anakin and Obi-Wan have to take refuge in).  They are there for the *entire* book, mostly dealing with having to fix things around the village, their own strained boundaries, etc.  While the highlight of the book for me actually took place in Torbel (the theta storm scene), after that the whole story went kind of downhill for me.  I mean, I didn’t HATE it, but it just dragged on way too much.

Going into some of the more negative, specific aspects of the book, I have to wonder why neither Anakin nor Obi-Wan thought to simply contact Yoda through the Force like Obi-Wan did on Zigoola in Wild Space.  Sure, I know it would’ve been challenging, especially due to their exhaustion, but Obi-Wan managed to do it alone when he was in probably even more pain than he was on Lanteeb.  Together, even if they were far away from Coruscant (FYI, I think Zigoola is farther away than Lanteeb) they could’ve contacted Yoda through the Force, at the very least giving him a clue as to what was going on.

Also, why could Palpatine just… summon a vision to see how everything would conclude when no one else, even Yoda, could get a hint of the future?  I understand that he might be the most powerful Sith of all time (or one of them), but isn’t that going a bit too far?  It would’ve been much more convincing had Miller just written that he had had a feeling everything would turn out all right.  But it seemed instead like he just saw EVERYTHING that happened and in my opinion that’s stretching it.

I still just can’t get enough of Taria Damsin.  She’s awesome, there’s no other way to put it.  And it was a huge surprise when she didn’t actually die, like a vision of Obi-Wan’s in Stealth led me (and probably other people) to believe.  There was a scene in Siege that could’ve been slyly put off as the vision, so kudos to Karen Miller for surprising me, cause I had definitely predicted she would die in this book.

One last negative thing about the book - I thought the destruction of the bioweapon facility was rushed, almost as if Miller knew she had to include it somehow but just really wanted to get past it and… back to the Torbel story.  *sighs*

So to wrap it up - even if it doesn’t seem like it from my review, I did enjoy Siege, mostly due to the character development and writing.  However, there were some plotholes and it got slightly boring, so I have to say that out of Miller’s three novels so far, this is probably my least favorite.  I would recommend this to people who read Stealth and enjoyed it; also to people who enjoy stories with Anakin and Obi-Wan.  I would NOT recommend it if you have not read Stealth already, because you’ll probably be a bit lost.