five sentences for the price of one

My own pre-ordered copy of Star Wars: Allegiance is in transit, but I thought I'd look for some reviews. This gem is one of those. I appreciated the opinions expressed, as well as the level of detail, but man alive, is it a confounding piece to read. Here is one of my favorite sentences, yep, just one sentence:

After experiencing a most welcome and I thought a highly unlikely circumstance: two recent, highly recommended Star Wars efforts - written by Karen Traviss and Aaron Allston and both associated with the promising Legacy of the Force sequence - Zahn's effort fell short of those reading experiences, not undone by premise, as this nook in the EU - at least conceptually - represents an obvious draw to fans who have been waiting to see the exploits of a certain Mara Jade in her Imperial position and to what I think is a growing trend - the popularity of military-styled SF and Fantasy represented by Storm Troopers in Allegiance.

If there was a little public-domain "English Horror" icon similar to the "Coding Horror" icon in Code Complete, I would slap it up right beside that text. I try to suppress my schoolmarmish penchant for well-written prose, but I can't stop it from bursting out of my stomach sometimes ala Alien.

Then again, I remember being extremely annoyed by the arbitrary "each paragraph must have five or more sentences" rule in school, because I thought each of my compound-complex sentences should have counted as two or more simple sentences. Apparently I've met my match in whoever wrote that review.