Revenge of the Sith novel cover

TL;DR: It's really good.

Revenge of the Sith is widely acclaimed to be the best movie of the three Star Wars prequels. I would contend that the Revenge of the Sith book is the best of the nine film novelizations.

Matthew Stover is really good at writing varying-length sentences. There's a cadence that makes this book very gripping to read. For example, here's an excerpt:

This is Obi-Wan Kenobi:
  A phenomenal pilot who doesn't like to fly. A devastating warrior who'd rather not fight. A negotiator without peer who frankly prefers to sit alone in a quiet cave and meditate.
  Jedi Master. General in the Grand Army of the Republic. And yet, inside, he feels like he's none of these things.
...

Go read the book.

Notice how the length of the sentence varies from a single emphasized word to a longer descriptive sentence? This Emphasis makes you read as though someone was speaking the words aloud instead of just reading words on a page and processing their meaning. It's almost like reading the script for a play where you can imagine the intonations and inflections as the performers emphasize words and insert pauses.

Stover also uses lots of anaphora which is a word I just learned today. Anaphora is the literary device of repeating a sentence structure but changing a word or two to convey a message in a rhythm. It's like rhyming but for tone and flow instead of word syllables. The example above uses "a $x who $y" repeated over a few sentences. Can't you just imagine a passionate speech being given where the speaker is saying "This is Obi-Wan Kenobi: ..." on stage? I can. This style of writing feels powerful. It feels like it's grand. It reads like you could imagine your grandfather or other old wise parental figure reading it to you as a bedtime story.

Here's an excerpt from another Star Wars book to emphasize the contrast in writing styles:

Dath Bane, the only Sith Lord to escape the devastation of Kaan's thought bomb, marched quickly under a pale yellow Ruusan sun, moving steadily across the bleak, war-torn landscape.

This reads much more like simple here's what's happening text. It's one sentence in a paragraph of descriptions similar to it. Long sentences describing physical things. Stover uses symbolism, metaphor, and other literary rhetoric to get you invested in swaying your head to the rhythmic anaphora of those poetic excerpts.

I think the "This is $x" verselets are some of the coolest character exposition ever done in Star Wars. The crown jewel of this has to be the finale of Anakin Skywalker's transformation into Darth Vader:

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:
  The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.
  The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew at your flesh.
  You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.
  You don’t even have lungs anymore.
  Mechanisms hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.
...

Go read the book.

But it's not just the excellent poetry that makes this book so good, it's also the use of metaphorical comparisons and other symbolic imagery instead of literal descriptions.

Two types of symbols are used in Revenge of the Sith: the banal situational imagery similes and the book-spanning emotional metaphors.

Quotes like "It's his own body, with thrusters for legs and cannons for fists" are a really good way of conveying strong ideas without explaining them further. In this example, it's how unified Anakin can be with his starfighter without spelling it out.

The point of a metaphor is to concentrate meaning and detail into a comparison so that you, the author, don't have to spend two sentences explaining it. It's like how English speakers can say "as the crow flies" to mean the more complex idea of "a straight line ignoring roadways, traffic, etc. between here and our destination". These idioms, similes, metaphors... They all help convey ideas in a manner that makes intuitive sense to the reader. Stover makes exceptional use of these to describe scenes. I think that's pretty good writing.

There are also deeper more integral metaphors that come back multiple times throughout the book. The best examples of this are the "furnace for a heart" and "cold dead dragon" symbols that are used to symbolize Anakin's fear-anger-hate-suffering cycle and his "all things die" fear of losing people he cares about.

These metaphors aren't just treated as coincidental throwaway lines that happen to match up either; they are central to how Anakin and other characters describe and view his inner psyche. This works.

The metaphor of how Anakin's walls around his furnace heart ice over and the dragon worms its way into his skull to chew on his brain with whispers of "All things die, Anakin Skywalker. Even stars burn out." is really good imagery. It means that Stover doesn't need to waste time describing how "Anakin used his fear to fuel his anger which fueled his hate" or how "Anakin was afraid of losing those he cared about more than anything else in the world".

Instead, we get a metaphor that concisely conveys those fears and how they weigh on Anakin without needing vague emotional words like "afraid", "worried", "apprehensive", etc. Instead, we get a symbol that tells the reader exactly what type of fear Anakin feels. The cold kind. The dead kind. That kind of fear is something that you can't easily explain without a situation or a metaphor that symbolizes that situation. Instead of describing "this fear was $x and $y" Stover expertly uses the dragon to represent that complex idea. Instead of "Anakin struggled with his emotions" we get a detailed account (using the dragon metaphor) of how Anakin finally gives in to the dragon and rushes to save Palpatine from Mace Windu.

None of the other Star Wars movie novelizations have this level of storytelling. Some of the other Star Wars books in the Expanded Universe are of the same caliber as Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover, but not many.

Stover is one of the few authors that I've seen do second-person narration. You saw it in the "this is how it feels to be $x" paragraph above: "the light burns you". I just thought that was interesting.

There's also some outside-the-main-plot text in the introduction that emphasizes my recurring point that this story feels like a perfect bedtime story. The introduction quite literally says:

This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.
  It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst.
...

Go read the book.

Doesn't that feel like it was meant to be read aloud to a listener? It does to me. It makes the book feel like a story and not just a diary or a Wookiepedia entry. There's also some interspersed philosophical talk about how "the dark" (not necessarily the Dark Side of the Force) works. It's almost as though this is one of Aesop's Fables and it has a message that it is attempting to convey even if it is like 100x as long as your typical fable.

And did I mention that the story is riveting? The plotline is quite literally that the devil of Star Wars himself (described by Count Dooku as "a black hole") infiltrates the galactic government, becomes a dictator, seduces the Jesus figure (Anakin Skywalker "the Chosen One"), wipes out the Faithful good guys, and gets that Jesus figure to fight his best friend and kill his wife. It really is a story and a half.

I like the Revenge of the Sith novelization. It was a pretty good read.

If you're in the United States, check out Libby to see if you can get Revenge of the Sith (book or audiobook) through your library system (FREE!). It's also available on Amazon and on Audible