Rating: 
Summary: Brian
Review: Normally, I love the star wars books, and have prided myself on reading every single book at least twice. I can't even finish this. It took me a month to get to page 200 because I didn't even want to pick the book up. The writing is bad, the plot is bad, and it had so much potential. It took 200 pages to get to a point, and I don't recommend that any read this. Not a normal recommendation from me for a star wars novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Junior Star Wars
Review: Ruins is the story of Dusque, an Imperial Bioengineer who becomes involved with a Rebel spy named Finn. This is a novelization of a video game and it reads like those fine Junior Jedi Scholastic Books novels about the Solo kids in their Jedi Academy days. The writing is simple and straight forward targeting younger readers. Because it was packaged in the same manner as the adult and older teen books this writing style bored me at first. I have read over a dozen of the Scholastic books and enjoyed them, but I was expecting something else here. The story took a long time to get involved with because the characters were a little to card board and unfamiliar. Dusque is a naive younger girl who is very smart. She joins Finn looking for a Holo with the names of rebel spies and sympathizers hoping to secure it before the storm troopers find it. The events take place after the battle of Yavin where the first Death Star was destroyed. The story itself purports to involve a great mission, but has no importance in the timeline of events for the SW galaxy. The holo is in the ruins of an old jedi temple on Dantooine. C3PO, Lando, Han, Luke and Leia make cameos. Once Finn enters the story, it gets more interesting and I do recommend it for younger readers.
Rating:
Summary: Junior Star Wars
Review: Ruins is the story of Dusque, an Imperial Bioengineer who becomes involved with a Rebel spy named Finn. This is a novelization of a video game and it reads like those fine Junior Jedi Scholastic Books novels about the Solo kids in their Jedi Academy days. The writing is simple and straight forward targeting younger readers. Because it was packaged in the same manner as the adult and older teen books this writing style bored me at first. I have read over a dozen of the Scholastic books and enjoyed them, but I was expecting something else here. The story took a long time to get involved with because the characters were a little to card board and unfamiliar. Dusque is a naive younger girl who is very smart. She joins Finn looking for a Holo with the names of rebel spies and sympathizers hoping to secure it before the storm troopers find it. The events take place after the battle of Yavin where the first Death Star was destroyed. The story itself purports to involve a great mission, but has no importance in the timeline of events for the SW galaxy. The holo is in the ruins of an old jedi temple on Dantooine. C3PO, Lando, Han, Luke and Leia make cameos. Once Finn enters the story, it gets more interesting and I do recommend it for younger readers.
Rating:
Summary: video game tie-ins seldom pay off
Review: The last Star Wars novel I read that was based on a video game was the excellent "Republic Commando: Hard Contact" by Karen Traviss. I had hopes that "The Ruins of Dantooine" could be nearly as good as the Traviss novel, but it wasn't to be. "The Ruins of Dantooine" felt somewhat like a video game and it just wasn't very good. The story was fairly simple and quest orientated and wasn't nearly as engaging as it could have been.
The Empire learns that a Rebel Holocron has been left on the planet Dantooine. The holocron contains a full list of all of the Rebel Alliance spies within the Empire. If it falls into the hands of the Empire it could effectively crush the ability of the Rebellion to operate. Everything would be compromised. The Empire sends one of their spies to recover the holocron. The Alliance sends Finn Darktrin to locate the holocron before the Empire finds it. An Empire biologist, Dusque Mistflier, somehow gets mixed up into the search for the holocron and assists Finn as Dusque becomes more and more disillusioned with the realities of the Empire.
This book just wasn't very interesting. The story itself is quite basic and followed a video game structure with missions and a boss battle. While the chance to explore Dantooine, and a post Prequel Trilogy Naboo was potentially interesting, the overall experience was weak and lacking. The one good thing here is that there is no need to have played the game to understand the story, but I can only hope that the game was better than this book. It was a nice effort, but the only reason to read this book is to read every Star Wars book published. That's about it.
-Joe Sherry
Rating: 
Summary: Semi-Successfull attempt to capture the Magic of X-Wing
Review: The Ruins of Dantooine (Star Wars: Galaxies) by Voronica Whitney-Robinson is the story of an Imperial biologist named Dusk and a Rebel spy named Finn as they attempt to find a secret code key on the recently evacuated Rebel base of Dantooine. The story iself was interesting although it was written in a more juvenile manner. Overall, The Ruins of Dantooine seems to be an attempt to create a storyline reminiscent of the X-Wing books. Stories based on the video games but driven by characters and events rather thatn visuals. There are two problems with this idea, one is that the X-Wing books were written by 2 superior writers. Whitney-Robinson is a fine writer but she is not a superior one. The stories from the X-Wing books were much stronger and while a sequal has been set up for the Galaxies book, there is little interest in completing Dusque adventures. This book is not bad and its a fine read if you want something that is really just fluff, but it's hampered either by the authors limitations or (more likely) by restrictions placed on the author by the publishing company.
Rating: 
Summary: Strong Addition to Star Wars Story
Review: The Ruins of Dantooine is a mostly well-written story from the classic era of the Star Wars saga taking place between the events of Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Talented author Voronica Whitney-Robinson is also a biologist, and she plays to her strengths by making her heroine, Dusque Mistflier, an Imperial bioengineer. Dusque is an intelligent and eminently competent protagonist although a bit overly prone to self-doubt. Whitney-Robinson deftly insinuates a bit of feminism into the plot which could help attract more female readers to the series. Also, the addition of romance has been trending fairly heavily recently in science fiction and fantasy, and the author adds a dash of that here, but not so much that the central action/adventure suffers at all. Like a lot of Star Wars authors, Whitney-Robinson skews heavily to the techno side of the saga and hardly touches on the mysticism of the Force at all. What is different here is the author's ability to create a large menagerie of alien fauna and her protagonist's ability to use her knowledge of "xenobiology" to keep one step ahead of death. Pantheon characters such as Luke and Leia are used sparsely, but the author does a good job of keeping them true to character. The best Star Wars stories evoke the energy of the "little people" risking their lives for freedom from tyranny and, in places, Whitney-Robinson captures that essence. Although there is a faint sense of incompletion suggesting that a sequel is forthcoming, this is stronger than a lot of Star Wars fiction and certainly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Strong Addition to Star Wars Story
Review: The Ruins of Dantooine is a mostly well-written story from the classic era of the Star Wars saga taking place between the events of Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Talented author Voronica Whitney-Robinson is also a biologist, and she plays to her strengths by making her heroine, Dusque Mistflier, an Imperial bioengineer. Dusque is an intelligent and eminently competent protagonist although a bit overly prone to self-doubt. Whitney-Robinson deftly insinuates a bit of feminism into the plot which could help attract more female readers to the series. Also, the addition of romance has been trending fairly heavily recently in science fiction and fantasy, and the author adds a dash of that here, but not so much that the central action/adventure suffers at all. Like a lot of Star Wars authors, Whitney-Robinson skews heavily to the techno side of the saga and hardly touches on the mysticism of the Force at all. What is different here is the author's ability to create a large menagerie of alien fauna and her protagonist's ability to use her knowledge of "xenobiology" to keep one step ahead of death. Pantheon characters such as Luke and Leia are used sparsely, but the author does a good job of keeping them true to character. The best Star Wars stories evoke the energy of the "little people" risking their lives for freedom from tyranny and, in places, Whitney-Robinson captures that essence. Although there is a faint sense of incompletion suggesting that a sequel is forthcoming, this is stronger than a lot of Star Wars fiction and certainly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of fun
Review: This is a book based on a MMORPG and it is fun! It ties in with the game (yes, I play)nicely. It definitely is closer to the game than the EU, but I definitely think even folks who aren't playing Galxies are going to enjoy it.
A fun read and I'm looking forward to seeing these characters in-game!
Rating:
Summary: Better than typical game-to-book tie-in
Review: This is not Baldur's Gate 1 or 2. Thank your lucky stars! For fans of the on-line role playing game, Star Wars Galaxies (SWG), this is a neat little novel. I found the plot to be interesting, mostly because I have been playing SWG since it went retail and I thought it interesting to see how many of the game devices were woven into the plot. It's almost as if they developed a list of game characters, planets, professions, and beasts and see how many of them they could get into the book. They even refer to imperials as "imps". I could see my own character in the locations described and felt like "I" was there. If you are not a player or fan of SWG then skip this Star Wars entry as the characters are mostly cardboard and the plot pretty predictable. I will give kudos to the author(s) for having courage in the ending, however. Overall, I enjoyed it but wouldn't recommend it to a non SWG player
Rating:
Summary: Don't expect a Tim Zahn story
Review: This story was okay but if you're looking for something to rival Timothy Zahn's work then pick up his latest rather than this. The additions of touches from the game are cute but get tiring by the end and it becomes obvious to anyone whose read years of science fiction that it was written by a fanfic "writer" (like Kevin Anderson - bleh!).
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