Category Archives: Books

The Princess, The General, and the Story Group: in praise of old favorites in new canon

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It’s no secret to anyone who knows me well that I’m not altogether fond of the way that the new post-ROTJ canon has treated Leia. By the time we see her in The Force Awakens, her career is shattered, her marriage is strained, and her only son has become a Vader-worshipping genocidal maniac. These are not the kinds of things that I ever would have said that I wanted for my favorite character. Half the time I go around sad for her fate and the rest of the time I go around scared for what the future of Star Wars storytelling has in store for her. But this is not an article about that. This is…well… the opposite.

One of my chief complaints about the (much beloved) Legends universe of storytelling was that Leia’s character seemed to be difficult for many writers to nail down, and even more difficult to keep consistent across multiple series and authors. As much as abuse as the new canon has heaped onto Leia, that particular violation is gladly absent from her current portrayal. One of the best things I have found about the new canon and the work of the Lucasfilm Story Group is the fantastic job they’ve done with the internal consistency of the universe- not only as it pertains to the events in the Galaxy as a whole, but also in the portrayals of the passions and the motivations of the individual characters. Continue reading →

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Review: Aftermath: Life Debt (audiobook)

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By now a great many of you have likely already purchased and read Life Debt, the second novel in Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy. Some of you may be waiting, however — for payday, for a free moment … or for someone to help you decide between the print version and the audio version. Likewise, there may be some of you who, for whatever reason, aren’t able to (or prefer not to) read the print version, and may be waiting to hear if the audiobook is an acceptable presentation of Wendig’s prose. Hopefully this review will help those folks, as well as anyone else who might be considering the audio version, decide if it’s for them.

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Review: Aftermath: Life Debt

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Life DebtLook. I enjoyed the first Aftermath book well enough and it held up favorably during a second reading but Life Debt blows it out of the water. Maybe it’s the broader scope of the story, maybe it’s the inclusion of more familiar characters, maybe it’s the story itself. I don’t know. Point is: Life Debt is one hell of a fun read. Continue reading →

Go/No-Go: Life Debt

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nasa-mission-control-3Welcome back to Go/No-Go, Tosche Station’s regular feature where we offer our spoiler-free opinion as to whether or not you should spend your hard-earned money on a book, film, or other entertainment. Today on the launch pad: Star Wars: Life Debt.  The second in our first post-Return of the Jedi trilogy, it’s a book that’s certain to get a lot of chatter over the next few months.  We here at Tosche Station all rather enjoyed Chuck Wendig’s first Aftermath book but how do we feel about the second?  To mission control for the verdict!

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Interview: Jon Klassen

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This Is Not My HatThis past April I attended the first Alaska Robotics Mini-Con and had the opportunity to interview award-winning children’s book author and illustrator Jon Klassen, creator of I Want My Hat Back and This is Not My Hat and illustrator of Lemony Snickett’s The Dark, among many others. Listen to us talk about his time working in animation, visual storytelling, turtles, hats, and Star Wars as a series of moments!

Jon Klassen’s art can be seen at his website here and he can be found on twitter as @burstofbeaden. You can e-mail him at info@jonklassen.com. His upcoming book, We Found A Hat, in which two turtles in a desert find one hat, will be available this October and his other books are available now, wherever fine books are sold.

Review: Star Wars: Bloodline

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SW_Bloodline_coverIt’s difficult and I mean reeeeeally difficult to impartially review a book that feels like it was written specifically for you. It’s hardly a secret that I’m the token politics nerd and Alderaan die hard around here. There are only two things that this book could have possibly done to make me love it even more. The first would have been bringing Winter back into canon and the other gets us into spoiler territory. (The third would be bringing Padmé Amidala back from the dead but that seems highly unlikely in any scenario. This is Star Wars, not comics.) All this is to say that Bloodline by Claudia Gray felt tailor made for me and the two and a half hours I spent reading it were one hell of an emotional roller coaster.

Set in the years before The Force Awakens, Bloodline tells the story of Leia before the galaxy comes crashing down around her a second time. The New Republic is well established at this point and two distinct political parties have formed in the Senate. Senator Leia Organa, however, is kind of over all of it. The time is starting to feel right for her to retire and go spend more time with her family but first… one last mission shouldn’t cause too much trouble, right?  Continue reading →

Go/No-Go: Bloodline

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nasa-mission-control-3Welcome back to Go/No-Go, Tosche Station’s regular feature where we offer our spoiler-free opinion as to whether or not you should spend your hard-earned money on a book, film, or other entertainment. Today on the launch pad: Bloodline by Claudia Gray. It’s not only our first look at the years before The Force Awakens but also the political Leia book we’ve been clamoring for for years. But how did it go over with us? To mission control for the verdict!

Bria: Bloodline is the book that I’ve wanted desperately for years. As the resident political nerd and lover of all things Alderaan/Organa/Leia, this book sounded like it was going to be right in my wheel house. Spoiler Alert: It was. This is a book that literally begins with the New Republic having a dedication ceremony for a statue of Bail Organa and it only keeps getting better. Bloodline is the emotional love child of Razor’s Edge, The Force Awakens, and Kenobi and if you don’t think that’s a good thing, I don’t know what to tell you. Claudia Gray writes a pitch perfect Leia who feels like the logical progression of a character we last “saw” 20+ years ago. This Leia has decades of politics and rebelling under her belt but neither is she quite yet the Resistance General Organa that we saw in Episode VII. Everything is just perfect. Gray does an incredible job with fleshing out the galaxy in the years before The Force Awakens and answers some of our questions without making it feel like a checklist. The supporting cast is also fantastically written and I promise that you’ll never look at Korr Sella in those few moments on Hosnian Prime the same way again. However, the two standouts are most definitely Greer Sonnel and Ransolm Casterfo. Greer’s a former racing pilot turned Leia’s Chief of Staff and Ransolm is a Senator from the opposite party who also likes to collect Imperial artifacts. Both could have easily been archetypes but Gray does oh so much more with them that I can’t really go into without spoilers. And then there’s the Organa stuff. THE ORGANA STUFF. Bloodline gets one of the strongest GO recommendations from me in a very long time and I will definitely #VoteLeia for First Senator.

Nanci: Two days after finishing this book and I can’t stop thinking about it, which you know is the mark of a good book. There’s a few things I disliked — mainly the glossing over of certain scenes I really wanted to read — but mostly Bloodline left me wanting more in a really good way. For those of you worried that a political book would be boring, you have nothing to fear. Yes, it’s political, but it’s also fast-paced, easy to understand, and does a great job setting the stage for The Force Awakens. And then there’s the characters. Oh, the characters. There’s been so much good Leia stuff lately (Moving Target, Princess Leia), and Bloodline is definitely the pinnacle of that. Leia is the star of this book and unlike a lot of Legends content we’re not focusing on her marriage or her family. We’re focusing on her job as senator and how her family history plays into that. However, the character who surprised me the most in this book is without a doubt Ransolm Casterfo. I was shocked at how much I liked him. At times, his story moved me to tears. In general, this novel both had me turning pages but also dreading what would happen next. While I loved Aftermath (Sinjir is still my favorite character of the new canon), Bloodline gets the crown of best novel in the new canon so far. Definitely GO buy it.

Flight Director’s Ruling: Bloodline is a GO for launch!

Review: Tales from a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Aliens Volume 1

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With Tales from a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Aliens Volume 1, Landry Q. Walker returns to a good old element of Star Wars: short stories about the random beings we see in the background of the films. The 90s saw the publication of more than a few of these, ranging from Cantina tales to Jabba’s Palace. Walker lets the background characters from Jakku and Maz Kanata’s castle take starring roles in these six stories, helping flesh out the universe just a little more in this collection.

High Noon on Jakku
At last! We have found the elusive Constable Zuvio! High Noon on Jakku is a fun little mystery tale where, interestingly enough, the most intriguing character is a droid called CZ-1G5. It’s also a story that provokes thought about the state of droids in the galaxy far, far away. Is it still odd for some of them to not have owners? It’s definitely odd to think about the concept of a droid having free time and doing volunteer work.

A Recipe for Death*
A Recipe for Death is like the lovechild of Chopped and your detective show of choice with a dash of Star Wars. (That was a sentence I never expected to type.) This story really helps drive home that these are definitely a return to the old Tales from collections. Where else would you have a Star Wars story devoted to a whodunit tale set in a kitchen? This particular story was engaging and kept me guessing all the way to the final reveal of the murderer and the new sous chef.  Continue reading →

Star Wars News from C2E2

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Star Wars fans didn’t have to wait very long to get comics and books related announcements from C2E2 out in Chicago but it was all rather vague.  At a retailer breakfast this morning, it was announced that Marvel will be releasing a three issue comic plus a standalone issue in October that will be related to Rogue One.  No writer or artist has been announced yet.  We don’t know any other details but it’s likely filling a similar role to what Shattered Empire was for The Force Awakens.  The Star Wars Free Comic Book Day offerings will be $1 a pop copies of some of the previously released books, mostly #1s.

At the Star Wars books panel this afternoon, the big announcement was Star Wars: Catalyst.  Arriving on October 4th, the novel will be a prequel to Rogue One… and that’s all we know.  Author announcement is forthcoming.  Start the betting pool.

Outside of the Rogue One pattern, we did learn from Claudia Gray that a character from Lost Stars will make an appearance.  You may also start the betting pool on this one.  Claudia Gray also mentioned that the reason for the Bloodline’s delay was that she wanted to see The Force Awakens before finalizing her draft but also that this is a book about Leia herself  and not Leia defined by her roles as wife or mother.  For fans of Mark Waid’s run on the Leia comic, it sounds like Gray had the option to pull from the book but didn’t so don’t expect Queen Evaan to appear.

The Star Wars books panel featured Claudia Gray, John Jackson Miller, Jeffrey Brown, Adam Bray, and Elizabeth Schaefer.  You can read Newsarama’s liveblog here for some of the more fun tidbits that panelists mentioned throughout the hour.

Review: Passenger

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You know how sometimes you’ll pick up a book you only know a tiny bit about but expect to be enjoyable? And then you start reading the book and realize that it’s so much more than you expected and that you’re having too much fun to put the book down? That’s how Passenger by Alexandra Bracken was for me. I’m always down for a fun, time travel story back to Colonial times (blame it on Felicity being my favorite American Girl growing up) but this gave us time travel through a lot of time periods and a pair of throughly enjoyable protagonists.

But let us backtrack for a moment. Passenger is about a violin prodigy named Etta Spencer who gets thrown not only backwards in time but also into a family conflict that spans thousands of years. Whether she likes it or not, she’s now on the hunt across the ages for a very powerful object with only days to find it and her only help is from a man named Nicholas Carter who may or may not be on her side.

Etta’s realistic attitude towards being trust into this mess is refreshing. She’s not immediately an expert at whatever time she finds herself in and her initial reaction to finding herself on a ship in Colonial times immediately after experiencing a tragedy is refreshingly honest. Her friendship with Nicholas evolves naturally as does their romance. (Speaking of which, there are no love triangles here!) Nicholas is another well-rounded character.  He too feels out of place but for reasons that are most definitely framed within his time period. Bracken doesn’t brush all the prejudices against Nicholas under the rug but rather uses them to influence what sort of person he is.

Another thing that makes this book so fun is that I never knew where (or when) Etta and Nicholas might find themselves next. The story isn’t restricted to just the Western World and actually peaked my interest in these other areas of history.

Fair warning! Passenger ends on a bit of a cliffhanger and, if you get as caught up in the story as I did, you’ll likely lament that Wayfarer isn’t in your hands yet. And if that’s not a sign of a good book, I don’t know what is.