Reviews by Ranpo #1: Vader's Little Princess

I will be reviewing a graphic novel in this first book review entry.

Vader's Little Princess, by Jeffrey Brown, 2013, Chronicle Books LLC.
http://www.StarWars.com

Because I am an Amazon.com associate, I can also embed a sales box for every book I review, and so of course I will do so:

and since you should never miss an opportunity to offer something of value to your readers, I'll also share the sales box for the companion book in this series, even though I haven't read it yet:

There's something serendipitous about searching for books on Amazon (and Barnes & Noble - you can be an associate of both, by the way) - I've also just discovered that there's not only a Vader's Little Princess Wall Calendar 2014, but also a book called William Shakespeare's Star Wars, which might be a fun read. I'll have to check it out later.

The Review
My library has a single section given over to graphic novels for adults - about five long shelves worth. (The graphic novels for kids are in the kid's section on the second floor - that's where my favorite graphic novels are to be found, the Tintin works).

I browsed through this section last night on a whim, just to see if there was anything there to interest me. As is the way of things, I saw nothing that caught my eye until the very end of the shelves, when I saw the title Vader's Little Princess.

It was an intriguing title. I thought..."What the heck?" I picked up the book - a small one, about 5 X 6, and discovered that the "conceit" was that Darth Vader was raising his daughter Leia on the Death Star. It's 60 pages long, and isn't really a novel at all, but rather a series of one-page vignettes, jokes - whatever the technical term is!

I glanced through a few of them, found them amusing, and decided to give this book the honor of the first to be reviewed by Edogawa Ranpo for the Freelance Writer Magazine blog.

The Voice
Whatever you write, you have a "voice" that you can use. You can write in a straight-forward way and keep your personality out of it, or you can write in a friendly, chatty way and attempt to draw your reader "in" to your world. Some people enjoy the chatty style, others look at it askance and think, "You've spent four paragraphs maundering on about you - get to the book review, already."

I have modeled my review style on the essay style of Isaac Asimov - science fiction writer and science popularizer. In his non-fiction science essays - at least the ones published in his monthly column for The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy (SF & F), he'd spend the first two paragraphs telling an anecdote before getting in to the essay proper. I liked that, I have adopted it for my use. Of course Asimov's readers enjoyed these little personal insights because they were reading about the life of Asimov - will people enjoy the same type of "personal anecdotes" from someone whom they otherwise don't know at all? Time will tell.

Back to the Review
Vader's Little Princess is written and illustrated by Jeffrey Brown, and quite frankly it is a lot of fun. Brown knows his Star Wars. Leia is presented as a little girl with the donut swirls by her ears, and an Ewok teddy bear. Usually she wears the white dress that we saw in the first Star Wars movie, but occasionally she's in other costumes.

For example, Brown presents an teenage version of Leia, dressed in her slave girl costume from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, her back to her father, who tells her, "You're not going out dressed like that!"

The opening page of the book, with text reminiscent of the opening prologue in the first Star Wars sets the scene:
Episode Three and Three-Quarters
VADER'S LITTLE PRINCESS
Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, continues to rule the Galactic Empire and is out to destroy the heroic Rebel Alliance. Meanwhile, he must raise his young daughter, Leia, as she grows from a sweet little girl into a rebellious teenager...

So there are panels showing Vader teaching Leia how to "drive" the Death Star, Vader taking Leia to school in one of the Walkers from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Vader wondering if Leia is wearing her pajama bottoms to school, Vader staring at the slumbering Leia and thinking, "Her resistance to getting out of bed is considerable. It will take some time before we can wake her."

There are other homages to the dialog of the three movies presented as well. For example, Leia is holding up a cellphone and says, "I think it's telemarketer's calling." Darth replies, "Leave them to me, I will deal with them myself."

Han Solo is cast as Leia's date in her teenage years, and her brother Luke makes an appearance now and then as well.

This little book is a lot of fun and I think fans of the original Star Wars trilogy will find it amusing. Brown knows the movies inside and out, and it shows. The drawings are in the "comic book" style, but rendered with precision.