Read, You Must: These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For

The easiest way to describe Scholastic’s new LEGO Star Wars: These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For would be to call it a LEGO Star Wars take on the popular Where’s Waldo books (or Where’s Wally outside of North America). This “Search-and-Find” book puts you on the hunt, scouring 30 colourful pages of crowded Star Wars scenes looking for tiny, often hilarious, details or spotting differences from page to page.

IG-88's big scene!

The title and cover are correct: despite the close-up on C-3PO and R2-D2, those are not the droids you’re looking for. The title (famously spoken by Obi-Wan Kenobi as he tricked stormtroopers in Mos Eisley) refers to the fact that in each picture you are hunting for the bounty hunter droid IG-88. Good thing they provide a reference picture and info because IG-88 only appears briefly in Episode V among the other bounty hunters hired by Darth Vader to find the Millennium Falcon. It’s an obscure character to centre a 2014 children’s book around, but no matter, there’s plenty else to find once you’ve located the “evil droid”.

It should've been Where's WATTO!

Hey I found Wald! Oh, wrong guy?

The humour fits right in with the LEGO Star Wars TV shows and the more you scour these pictures the more funny bits there are to discover. Some of the gags are very clear while others are miniscule and almost hidden. 

Look hard enough at these detailed crowd scenes and you’ll spot gungans frozen in carbonite, wampas making snowmen, clone troopers reading Star Wars books and a LOT of pizza...from “Pizza Hutt”, of course. 

Even if you don’t want to put the effort into playing detective you can enjoy these action-packed, imaginative takes on famous Star Wars scenes.

LEGO Star Wars: These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For is a lot of fun and is recommended for ages 7 and up, but if your youngling is younger than that then I imagine they’d still get a lot of enjoyment out of this book. Perhaps any further such books could have a few more scenes. This one left me wanting more!

- Chris @SWKidscast