Star Wars – Clone Troopers in Action is a level 2 DK Readers book that my sons and I recently checked out, not surprisingly featuring many of those popular soldiers.

Sitting at level 2, this book is a little harder for my first grader to read on his own, so mostly I just have him supplement my own reading of the book by asking him to read one sentence per page. Both my sons were excited to read this book since it features Clone Troopers. Unfortunately, it also didn’t really live up to their expectations.

You see, Clone Troopers in Action is really a Star Wars “movie” book ; there are no characters from The Clone Wars series. You get some scenes from Attack of the Clones and some from Revenge of the Sith, as well as mentions of the Stormtroopers from the original trilogy. All of which leads to many problems.

First up, they include the troopers turning on the Jedi from Revenge of the Sith (which my kids haven’t seen) so… I skipped over most of that page.  It talks about how the Clones became Stormtroopers once the Empire took over (which is certainly alluded to by the movies, though the Expanded Universe would lead us to believe otherwise).

Either way, here again is a subject I don’t really want to talk about with my sons: their heroes from The Clone Wars are now the bad guys? Of course, none of the characters they know from the TV series are in this book anyway, and they only marginally look like what they’re used to from the show so it wound up being more of a frustration than a success.

I’m not sure I know what the key to an excellent Star Wars DK Reader book is. There have been some TV episode adaptations that were great and some not so much. There have been some great movie-based ones, and some duds. I think the more encyclopedic ones are often the best ones, featuring a bunch of Jedi or planets.  Ultimately I think the biggest downfall of this book, being that it focused on Clone Troopers, was in not featuring any from the TV series where we’re gotten to know more Clones than in any other place in the saga.

I may have given the impression that my kids didn’t enjoy this book at all.  That’s not true. They did like seeing the clones and hearing about the battles they were fighting. It’s just that they also asked me where Rex and his buddies were so it only partially met their expectations. Keep that in mind when thinking of picking this book up for any kids, who are likely to be familiar with the TV series and expecting much the same from a book with this title.