Iskat is also very sympathetic, certainly in the front section of the book. She's an outsider among the Jedi, avoided by many after a training accident caused harm to another student. Iskat works alongside a Jedi Master who seems to care for her only distantly, as an assistant in search of rare artifacts. There's none of the bond we see between Obi-Wan and Anakin here, only a more absolute distance, wrapped in a philosophy of detachment.And Iskat is trying very hard to be what everyone else wants her to be, and struggling, it seems, against who she wants to be. The story manages to show us the Jedi not as heroes, but as an institution. A bureaucracy, a school that has a model for how those within it should be, or must be, and those who don't fit that model are...disappointments.
If you've ever been different from your peers, if you've ever felt the edge of disappointment in the voices of teachers, mentors, friends, if you've ever felt like you were alone, this will all sound searingly familiar.
Then, Iskat finds something she's good at. As war engulfs the galaxy, Iskat discovers that she can fight, and can kill, and that she's good at it. Unfortunately, despite being in a fight for survival, the Jedi Order has no time for warriors, for those who enjoy the fight, for those who make choices they might not, under pressure. Iskat finds that instead of plaudits and assignments, she faces ostracism, silence and condescension. Individuals are so wrapped up in themselves that they don't see her pain, or dismiss it, or don't have the time to deal with it in the way that they think it should be done. So instead she's left to find her own path, riven from the support of the institution while being attacked for the choices she makes without that support.
I have a lot of empathy for Iskat.
Eventually, of course, things fall apart, and Iskat gets to decide if she wants to die a hero, or take a different path. Unsurprisingly, given the cover, you can probably guess how that turns out. But the trick is that each step of the way we're there with Iskat, living her fear of failure, her fear of ostracism, her fear of abandonment, and seeing that fear backed up in the actions of those around her, in a world that seems determined to shove her square peg into a Jedi-shaped hole, whether it fits in there or not, and no matter how uncomfortable she may be about it. And you can see how the environment around her, and the whispers of acceptance are so powerful. How finally getting to live her life as herself and not one crushed by the weight of others expectations has significant appeal.
This is, of course, a tragedy. The rise of the red blade is the fall of Iskat, the Padawan, the Jedi Knight, even while it may also be the rise of Iskat, the person. Does she do terrible things? Of course. But we know what shaped those choices, we know that if she's not justified, she's certainly valid in her concoction of self-justification. The story doesn't flinch away from what the Inquisitors are, and neither does Iskat - she just finds the price worth it to be free - at least for a while.
This isn't a happy story. It's a character study of someone in pain, someone alone, someone making sacrifices every day to appear somewhere near what their society expects. It's a story of someone feeling like they have to hide who they are, of the way institutions, even benign ones, can fail us, and the costs to both them and us when that happens. It's Iskat's story, but it's a story that resonates with anyone who's ever felt like they were on the outside looking in, that they weren't being given a chance to show what they could do, or able to live as who they were. It's a story that hurts, and that's the highest praise I have to offer. It will make you feel. Go, read it, you won't regret it.
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