The Tales books are not what I expected. What I expected was a series of stories set in and around the places and characters of the Star Wars universe with multiple personalities and many quirky incidents. Pretty run-of-the-mill entertainment stuff.

What I got was a selection of mostly well-written stories with interesting characters and neat, sometimes funny incidents.

The first story of the Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina is, in my opinion, the best of all the books. We Don’t Do Weddings is a nice little romp and tells us a little about the cantina band. Later stories, based around the arrival of Luke and Ben at the cantina, are entertaining and the way the plots intertwine with each other is clever, if a little dodge in some places. There are a couple of stories, which seem very lame, as if writers have tried to inject something other than Star Wars into the mould. These stories just don’t feel as though they have the flavour of what Star Wars is about. Also, all of the stories concentrate on all the aliens seen in the original movie. Lavishing attention on recognisable icons maybe a good idea but I, personally, do not think the entire galaxy revolves around them. Each of the incidental characters seem to have a star-shuddering secret story to unravel. I always thought they were how they were depicted in the film - background characters. Still, it’s an interesting collection of stories and will please the average Star Wars fan.

Tales from Jabba’s Palace was more of a situation comedy than collection of stories. Each of the stories revolves around the incident from Jedi, during the Rancor incident and later at the Sarlacc’s pit. Familiar characters from Jabba’s courtroom are there, and the run of stories is pretty much the same as the cantina stories, with the plot intertwining with each story and the events from the film. There are a couple of silly stories in there, but the majority of them are well thought out and, like I said before, quite funny.

Tales of the Bounty Hunters should never have been written. None of the stories stand out, except maybe for the Bossk story and the last story involving Boba Fett (the last few paragraphs of which I think are absolutely fantastic). The majority of stories are just awful - the first one, with IG-88 as the main character, is one of the worst Star Wars stories I have ever read. The end of it had me holding my head in my hands and shaking uncontrollably. The same goes for the Dengar story - the ending really was a travesty (you try not cringe when, at the end of the story, Dengar asks Boba Fett to do something for him). The other stories, though readable, are not fantastic.

So overall? Well, a collection of short stories is a really good idea, but I can’t help thinking that authors are milking every drop of creativity from the celluloid Star Wars, trying to create their own little worlds in the small, inconsequential parts of the movies. I’m sure they are trying to write about something the reader can identify with, but I also think that fans out there have created so much stuff of there own that there are a thousand more stories to be told. The galaxy is a big place, after all.

I would recommend the books, although Tales of the Bounty Hunters should be bought tentatively, because there are only a couple of stories worth reading.