Roan, a native of Tatooine has always expected to be accepted to the Pilot Academy, where he will learn to fly just like his grandfather, father, and older brother before him. When he is accepted to the Jedi Academy instead, he doesn’t understand why - and neither do his classmates, many of whom have been training as Jedi from birth. Nonetheless, Roan shows up at school for the most difficult year of his life, which will involve gym class taught by a Wookiee, cryptic advice from a short green guy called Yoda, and learning to use something called the force, without trying to learn how to use it.
While Tom Angleberger brings Star Wars characters and references into the middle school environment in his wildly popular Origami Yoda books, Jeffrey Brown does just the opposite - he brings middle school to the Star Wars universe. What a great idea! This book combines the two things male readers in grades 3 to 8 love more than anything else: the Star Wars franchise and stories told in drawings and diary entries. If I were a nine-year-old boy, I doubt I could imagine a more perfect book.
Roan’s story is pretty typical of most school stories, in that it follows him through an academic year as he becomes accustomed to new friends and a new environment. To be honest, not very much about that aspect of the story is all that memorable. What keeps the story moving is the reader’s curiosity about how Roan’s story fits into the Star Wars canon. Though I am by no means a die-hard fan, I think Brown does a great job of telling a new story set in this universe without deviating too much from George Lucas’s vision. Readers who know a lot about Star Wars will be pleased to find that the references Brown makes to places and characters created by Lucas make sense in this new context, and that the Jedi Academy does not exist in a vacuum. Readers who don’t know much about Star Wars won’t be lost, though, because Roan is as new to the way of the Jedi as any Star Wars novice. He can’t even understand Yoda when he first meets him!
Finding this book an audience won’t be difficult. Recommend it to fans of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Big Nate, Smile, Drama, Dear Dumb Diary, and Clueless McGee. Libraries should plan to purchase multiple copies - I expect this book to be popular and for kids to “forget” to bring it back.
I received a digital ARC of Star Wars: Jedi Academy from Scholastic via NetGalley.
For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat.
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