Last week I showed off a list I made of every Star wars Legends adult novel in a ranked list. This was done by taking the aggregated user star ratings across five of the most popular websites to try and put together a list that most accurately represented what people think about these books. In total I collected more than 1.5 million user star ratings, though those weren't all for the Adult Novels, in fact I did the same for the young adult and young reader novels, which I will refer to as YA from now on for simplicity..
Now to get the full rundown of how I got these numbers you can do so here but as a quick recap I looked at the star ratings left by the users reviewing these books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and anobii. Each of these websites had user rating on a 5 star rating level and all seem to calculate them based on weighted average. So I combined the user star ratings of all five also using weighted averages to get each book's rating out of five.
Now forgive me as I am not as familiar with the young adult and young readers books as I am with the adult novels. I have found 123 and double checked with a few people to ensure I wasn't missing anything. I did leave out any picture books, coloring books or learn to read books for this analysis, or any books that weren't canon within the Legends continuity.
Doing all of this I got an average rating of 3.72 stars about 0.11 lower than the adult novel's average which is probably to be expected as one would expect a book written for adults to be in general better written than one for kids, though that isn't to say none of these books could compete with an adult novel. In fact some of these books actually would rank very highly on the adult novel list, which is something I'll explore a bit in a later article.
We can also get the standard deviation for the YA books at 0.2786 stars, which is 0.07 larger than the adult novels meaning that there is a wider variance in the star ratings of the YA books than the adult books. With both of these we can calculate the normal distribution of each book and graph them to get a standard deviation graph, which looks like this.
and here is the adult novels graph for comparison
Like with the adult novels it is a pretty nice bell curve though much wider, again indicating more variance. The right side tail of both is fairly short and breaks off at around the same spot indicating the highest end books are more or less comparable to each other. The left side tail is longer for both indicating more of a skew towards the bottom, however where as in the adult novels none of them reach the 3.0 stars mark in the YA graph you can see that the tail does extend well below that mark. Indicating that the difference in the variability is coming from there being more YA books at the bottom end. Again I'll go into more detail about this more in a couple of weeks when I cover the overall charts but I thought I'd bring it up here as a teaser.
Anyway graphs aside this is the list of the ranks for all 123 YA novels. Again this is not my personal opinion, this is simply what the numbers state so don't get mad at me if your favorite book or series isn't as high as you expect it to be. So here it is starting from the bottom and going up for added suspense. Star rating is out of five, and total ratings is how many people left a rating for that book.
This list was a bit of a surprise to me. Admittedly I've only read the Young and Junior Jedi Knights series so aside from my observations of what people in the community think of these books I didn't have much to go on. But the ones at the top were still a surprise to be sure. I'll go into more detail about my other findings about the YA books next week but in the meantime what do you think of this list, and do you agree or disagree with any of the placements? Let us know in the comments.
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