When a character like Thrawn has been around for almost thirty year and been a well-loved part of both the Legends and new canon universes, you’d think you might know just about everything there is to know about him. Timothy Zahn hears your speculation, smiles, and then kindly tells you that you are wrong in the form of a novel. The first in a brand new Thrawn-centric trilogy, Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising reminds us that while we know Thrawn fairly well in his capacity as an officer in the Galactic Empire, we really know nothing about the person he was back in the Chiss Ascendancy. And oh boy are we going to learn.
While the Clone Wars are raging in another part the galaxy, the Chaos has its own problems or, more specifically, the Chiss Ascendancy has its own problems. After an unknown enemy attacks them, Supreme General Ba’kif assigns Senior Captain Thrawn to investigate the matter as captain of the Springhawk. It’s an assignment that can easily go poorly… and bring forth more trouble than any of them could have anticipated for both Thrawn personally and the Ascendancy as a whole. (Unless someone studies their art. Obviously.) Continue reading
Who would have thought that 2020 would be the Year of The Clone Wars especially back when the series was cancelled after the Disney acquisition? And yet the Year of The Clone Wars it continues to be as Disney-Lucasfilm Press bring us the middle grade anthology Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark featuring stores by Lou Anders, Preeti Chhibber, Zoraida Córdova, Jason Fry, Rebecca Roanhorse, Greg Van Eekhout, Tom Angleberger, E. Anne Convery, Sarah Beth Durst, Yoon Ha Lee, and Anne Ursu. Each story also features a gorgeous illustration by Ksenia Zelentsova with whose fan art you might already be familiar. Is this a book that fans of the show are going to love? Definitely! And if you’re not already a fan? Well, let’s dive into that. 
Neither Yoda nor Luke Skywalker make an appearance in Poe Dameron: Free Fall by Alex Segura yet those are the words that kept echoing through my head the entire time I was reading the book. With the exception of the novelizations, Free Fall is the first book published after The Rise of Skywalker to intimately deal with one of the Sequel Trilogy’s major characters. I bring this up mostly because I suspect that many readers won’t just bring their personal feelings about Poe Dameron to the book but more specifically, their feelings about how The Rise of Skywalker handled the x-wing flyboy.
There’s a line in Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca’s original run on Darth Vader that has stayed with me ever since I read it. It’s Aphra looking up at Vader as she agrees to work with him. “But you’re my next mission, aren’t you?” she says. “And the next. And the next. You’re what I’ve been looking for all my life.” It’s a line that also appears in the audio drama and one that rang through my mind as I heard Darth Freaking Vader say “Doctor Aphra” for the first time because apparently that’s what I’ve been waiting for all my life.
What happens when you bring together five New Republic pilots who all fly different starfighters and put them under the command of an Intelligence officer and also one of the Rebellions best generals? You get Alphabet Squadron. And then, if you’re really lucky, you get three whole books about them! Thankfully, we are indeed really lucky or at least much luckier than the Alphabet Squadron crew.
Fifteen months ago, I wrote a review of Queen’s Shadow in which I expressed a hope that we might get both a prequel and sequel to that book. Mission (halfway) accomplished because Queen’s Peril by E.K. Johnston was published today and it is indeed a prequel to the 2019 novel, covering the time in Padmé’s life from when she was first elected queen through dealing with the Trade Federation’s invasion. (If I close my eyes and wish real hard again, will I also be able to will a sequel into existence too? This is the trilogy we deserve, dang it!) It is precisely the book you think it is and that is a very good thing. 
Novelizations are inherently tricky to review fairly and purely on their own merits. In the case of Star Wars novelizations, readers have definitely seen the movie before picking up the book and formed opinions, myself included. So let’s go ahead and get my biases out of the way: I came into this book with a fondness for Rae Carson’s writing and with something less than love for The Rise of Skywalker. I don’t say the latter to grind an axe with the movie but rather to offer a bit of clarity regarding my approach to such a polarizing film.