At this point I'm thinking: Who cares?Īnother cardinal rule is to introduce an interesting conflict as soon as possible. Moreover, his origami and the related case files are meaningless to me.
While Dwight is an integral character in the lives of other main characters, and does eventually figure more in the current story, at this point he's a character in absentia. He's a character who apparently got suspended in the second book and has since switched schools, taking his Origami Yoda with him. In The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee, Angleberger dedicates not just the first paragraph or the first page but the entire first chapter to an introduction of Dwight. The reason? Readers don't yet have a reason to care for the main character and so even the smallest account of the main character's past will bore them. One cardinal rule is not to start with the back story. Unfortunately, others such as The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee by Tom Angleberger prove the opposite.
Of those, a few are of high enough quality to prove to the world that rules can and should be broken. Sometimes books can break cardinal writing rules and still get published. That all being said, the elements in here that set up the fourth book are really intriguing, and I'm looking forward to see if Jabba the Puppet is a nice return to form for the set. It's still got some nice moments here and there, and the derails into Dwight's life are always welcome and nicely done, but in general, I didn't enjoy reading it with my son the way I did the first two. There are still some nice moments, mostly revolving around the kids starting to realize how Dwight is changing at his new school and why it might not be for the best, but in general Fortune Wookiee is a disappointing entry in the series, one that lacks a lot of the fun and whimsy of the other entires and ends up feeling more generic and dull than you'd expect. And while Fortune Wookiee is fine enough, it definitely feels less anarchic and fun than its predecessors, and it lacks some of the heart that Darth Paper started to bring out. Part of that just comes from the structure when you take Dwight, the creator of Origami Yoda and the wonderfully weird figure who the first two books orbited around, and remove him from the story, you're basically taking the most interesting character out of the story and hoping everyone else can carry it. I've mostly enjoyed the "Origami Yoda" series, which mixes a love of Star Wars and odd characters with typical middle school drama (tension between boys and girls, the urge to fit in), but The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee is the first one that felt aa bit uninspired and dull.
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