Book Review: Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade
If there’s one recurring nightmare Star Wars fans have to live through, it’s easily Order 66. The massacre that ended both the Jedi order and the Clone Wars is an event we have seen depicted time and time again - in animation, writing, video games, and live-action. Last year’s Obi-Wan Kenobi scratched the surface of what it meant to go from terrified Jedi Padawan to ruthless Inquisitor with the character of Reva, but in Delilah S. Dawson’s Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade, we dive a little deeper into that transition, through the eyes of Padawan Iskat Akaris.
Iskat is a Padawan out of place, growing up and training just as the Clone Wars are on the verge of breaking out (not that any of them know it, of course). But with war comes massive loss, and the more the loss adds up, the angrier Iskat gets - the type of anger that is not compatible with life in the Jedi order. Iskat has a history of rage and darkness, one her fellow apprentices hold against her, using it as an excuse to keep her apart.
Iskat is shut down at every turn as she tries to learn more about herself - she is the only being of her kind on Coruscant, and no one else knows where she comes from - and as she tries to make sense of her Masters dying words. As the frustration becomes unbearable, the Republic falls, and Iskat is given the chance to be remade, this time as an Inquisitor.
As a premise, this story is fascinating. We’ve seen what it looks like when a Jedi is tortured, brainwashed and forced into compliance as an Inquisitor, but one who willingly falls? Who embraces what they see as the gifts of being an Inquisitor? I might not want that for myself, but I can certainly see how the late days of the Jedi order would lead someone there.
The beginning of Iskat’s story set this fall up perfectly. She feels angry and misunderstood in an environment where both those sentiments are looked down on, and receives the sort of advice from her Masters that is the rough equivalent of telling a clinically depressed person to drink some water and go for a long walk to feel better. Dawson really builds up not only who Iskat is as a disgruntled Padawan, but what her relationships with her peers are like, and what the Jedi order was like far from the spotlight that is Kenobi and Skywalker.
If there is one major bump in Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade, it is the timing of Iskat’s fall. It doesn’t happen until roughly the two-thirds mark, leaving only one-third of the novel to tell the story of her years with the Inquisitorious. If the whole story was to be confined to one novel, I would have expected the fall at the halfway point, and if that was not to be, then I found myself wishing this had been a duology instead: one novel for the rise, one novel for the fall.
Because the rise of it all, the time spent with Iskat as a Padawan, is so thorough, it seems a shame to devote only 100 or so pages to her “liberation” with the Inquisitorious. There are plot elements there that I would have loved to see developed over an entire novel instead of confined to the final third. Padawans who fall to the dark, we have seen before. Padawans who relish the fall are something new, and I wish we’d had more time to really dig into that.
Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade is out July 18. Special thank you to Random House Worlds for the advance copy for review purposes.