This week on the pod, @celestialintent joins us in our first discussion of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova (start – chapter 11). We talk about who’s returning (and who’s new), life under the First Order, and plans gone awry. Adriana will join us throughout our reading, so stay tuned!
If you have the means and are able to do so, please continue to donate to help demand justice for BIPOC terrorized by police brutality and systemic racism.
For a list of black-owned bookstores to order from, now and always, click here.
To download a copy of this episode click here
Book Wars Pod explores the Star Wars universe through the franchise’s non-screen media: the canon novels, comics, and video games. Check out our guide to past episodes, and subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and wherever else you cast your pods. You can also subscribe to the Tosche Station Radio Mega Feed on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher for more great shows from our podcast network.
Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for episode updates! Hosted by Chris Sedor, Kate Sedor, and Miranda Eldon. Audio and production by Kristen Sereci. Art by Joe Butera. Music by Podington Bear.
This podcast has been brought to you in part by your support on Patreon!
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.
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.