I had a thought that I would start reading the many many,, many, Star Wars books, in as good of an order as I could find. Well that must have been foreshadowing, because finding an order of anything is Star Wars is “futile”

So I just jumped into the High Republic Timeline (youtini.com) and started with…

The High Republic: Path of Deceit by Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland.
(though that might not even be where one should start)

Again, I try not to give spoilers, or at least major spoilers, but YMMV

The set up and premise of the book is enticing with its new characters and new places as it is supposed to be setting up some of the Star Wars lore that we already know of.
Set back around 382BBY we are on the planet Dalna in the Outer Rim where Jedi Zallah Macri and her Padawan, Kevmo Zink are trying to retrieve stolen Force artifacts.

Yea that sounds great! Since they are already talking about the Jedi, the Outer Rim and stolen items, you know there are going to be enemies, action and other Jedi stuffs!

You would be wrong. Not until the very last bit of the book is there anything like this at all. It is a slow,, very slow ride getting there.

But there is world building and heavy story progression right? You would be wrong again.
Slow is one thing, but adding in that there are two different writers with starkly different styles sometimes bogges things down even further.

But the one thing the two did have in common, was the ability to make Star Wars into an after school, teen aged girl, made for tv, romance novel.

I seriously caught myself a few times not even reading, just paging through, trying to find anything of interest or of major consequence. There is very little of anything like that.
But the ending, where there actually is a bit of action, and some set up for the future and the Force, was,, good. But it nowhere near made up for the rest of the book.

I nearly quit. It was really that bad. Now, I know this could very well be just me, and others may find this book to be great.. But I do seriously doubt that.
This entire book could have been, should have been condensed down to a couple of sentence prologue to some other book, or the screen scroll of a movie.

I am glad its done. But now after that I’m not so sure I wanna go straight into the next book, if I can even figure out what the next one even is.