 I first read this book in 1978, just a few months after the first Star Wars movie, and rereading it now, I'm very surprised at how none of it is familiar. It's really just entirely forgettable. According to the story, Luke and Leia are on their way to a diplomatic meeting to recruit more rebels or something. They crash on a jungle planet and it turns out the Empire has secret bases there to help them get off planet. An old lady with force powers recruits them to help her find an ancient gem out in the jungle and Darth Vader shows up. It's the most generic story. You could replace the characters with anybody or anything. It really doesn't make much difference and honestly it reads like bad fan fiction written by a teenager. Luke and Leia are secretly mooning over each other constantly. They're getting red faced when they stand too close to each other and the reason they get arrested, the reason the Imperial troops even notice them, is because they're fighting in the street. They're literally rolling around in the mud, hitting each other like 10 year olds. There's a scene where Luke slaps Leia across the face and when she's threatened with interrogation like she had that one time on the Death Star she faints just thinking about it. The book has the obvious feel of something that was written very quickly for a buck and being the first Star Wars novel the characters have none of the traits or history that we all know and feel when we think about Star Wars. After finishing the book I did some reading about it and it has a lot more history than I could have imagined. Apparently it was written before the first movie was even in theaters simultaneously with the novelization of the film. Already in the 1970s Alan Dean Foster had a reputation for writing quick dirty novelizations of movies and George Lucas hired him to do the novelization and also to write a possible sequel and that's what became Splinter of the Mind's Eye. The phrase Mind's Eye by the way never appears in the book the jewel is called the kyber crystal I don't know the one thing about this book that impressed me on page 165 at the bottom the ancient temple where they find the jewel there's a gigantic statue a humanoid figure with leathery wings and tentacles for a face yes Cthulhu was written into the Star Wars universe even before the first movie was in theaters thanks to Alan Dean Foster you can support 30 second sci-fi and my other projects by becoming a patron there's a link in the description below and visit the 30 second sci-fi tumbler that's my headquarters in addition to my videos I publish links and updates there every day