Queen’s Shadow is the book I’ve been waiting twenty years to get to read.

When I first saw The Phantom Menace when I was nine years old, I instantly fell in love with not only Queen Amidala but all of her handmaidens too. I learned all of their names (Sabé, Rabé, Eiraté, Saché, and Yané!) and I eagerly consumed every last scrap of information I could find about their characters and even their actresses. Then, when Attack of the Clones came out, I added Dormé, Cordé, and Versé to the list and loved them all too. Eventually, I found my way to the online Star Wars fandom and found other women and teenage girls who also loved the handmaidens. I’m still friends with a few of them to this very day. Despite finding this community, the broader Star Wars fandom didn’t seem to really care about the handmaidens and the disdain of Padmé solidified after Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005. That was almost 14 years ago. Since then, we’ve been mostly deprived of new handmaiden content and Padmé gets spoken about as being less than some of the other Star Wars heroines.

That changes today.

Queen’s Shadow by E.K. Johnston is the book that finally puts all of these women in the spotlight and gives them the respect they deserve as they must figure out who they are and who they will become as Amidala goes from being Queen to being Senator. It is about the friendships and relationships between them, in particular between Padmé and Sabé. This a book that recognizes the strength and intelligence of teenage girls and celebrates how they use both fashion and societal expectations to their advantage. This book was worth waiting twenty long years.

As a Star Wars fan, it’s both fascinatingly bizarre and yet somewhat understandable how the three year gap between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith is chock-full of stories and yet the ten year gap between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones is mostly barren wasteland. For years, that’s been a disappointment as I always felt there were still plenty of stories to tell about Amidala’s reign and then her early years of the Senate. I’m delighted that Queen’s Shadow is helping fill that void (although I wouldn’t say no to an entire Padmé series set here.) The story is a damn good one, by the way. It’s likely that few, if any of us, ever put much thought into how Padmé may have struggled to find her footing when she first became Senator as she enters a brand new political arena but after reading Queen’s Shadow, it’s enough to make me wonder why I hadn’t.

One of the things that really stands out about the book is how Johnston expertly weaves together threads from across the canon timeline. You certainly don’t have to have read, watched, or played everything to love and appreciate the book but if you have played Battlefront II or read Shattered Empire and Leia: Princess of Alderaan, you’ll have an even deeper appreciation for different threads within the rich story tapestry. At the same time, it never feels as if she’s running down a check list of things to include and instead feels completely organic to the story she wants to tell. That said, I can guarantee one thing if you read Queen’s Shadow: you’ll never be able to watch the Prequels the same way ever again.

This is just as much Sabé’s book as it is Padmé’s, by the way. She’s on her own journey of figuring out who she is when physically separated from her friend and when she’s no longer her decoy. There’s telling line rather early on where Sabé says, “If only there was a way you could be in two places at once.” It’s impossible to truly delve into how layered and fantastically built the relationship between these two women is without running into spoiler territory. There is a love between these two women that’s so strong that friendship doesn’t seem to quite encompass it and neither is it romantic love. It’s something deeper and it’s beautiful and I wish we saw more platonic bonds like it.

All of the handmaidens, by the way, get their moments to shine in the book even if they aren’t quite equally in the spotlight. Even some of the Naboo guards play prominent roles. If anything, the book leaves me wanting more of just about every character. If Lucasfilm saw fit to greenlight both a prequel and a sequel to this novel, I’d be positively over the moon. These are characters who deserve even more of a chance to shine and we can always use more female role models in the galaxy far, far away.

When you’re eagerly anticipating a book, sometimes you run the risk of it not being able to meet your impossible expectations. That was certainly a risk I knew I was running as my excitement increased with each day since its announcement last summer. But I can happily say that Queen’s Shadow not only met those expectations but that it also took me on a delightful emotion ride and I found tears in my eyes at least once.

Some things are worth the wait.

Thank you to Disney Lucasfilm Press for providing an advance copy of the book for review purposes.