A lone wanderer with a red lightsaber faces down a group of bandits led by a Sith to help save a village… and that’s just where Star Wars Visions: Ronin by Emma Mieko Candon starts.
(Okay, wait. I’m sorry. The Ronin isn’t completely alone. He’s also aided by B5, aka: Hat Droid, aka: the best droid in the entire galaxy. We know no droid king but the droid in the straw hat whose name is B5-56.)
Ronin is not like any Star Wars book you’ve read before. It’s bold. It fully embraces the Japanese cultural influences that have long underwritten the galaxy far, far away. It grabs you by the heart and never lets go until the final page and even then, it will keep its grip on you well after you set the book down to go about your day. Ronin is the sort of Star Wars book that could have only come from the Visions project and from an author like Candon and we, as fans, are all the more fortunate to get to read it.
If you’ve watched the Star Wars Visions: “The Duel” on Disney+, you’ve already got a pretty good idea of how this book begins. After all, the events of the short are covered in the first few chapters of the novel. But from there, Candon delivers a master class in storytelling that invokes the Kurosawa vibes of the short and feels so very Star Wars at the exact same time. It’s a wild ride from start to finish with such beautiful, beautiful prose and a whispering mystery that weaves itself throughout the tale. It is Star Wars through the lens of folklore with many a moment that will likely hit even more impactfully for readers of Asian descent.
There aren’t a ton of characters from the short to Candon to work with but they certainly make the most of them. The Ronin (never named in the spirit of the short) had a feeling of history to him and that history gets expanded on here but with a little room left for mystery. It’s Kouru (the Sith bandit leader) however who truly benefits from another chance at life in these pages. Candon took an objectively badass, intimidating woman and gives her so much depth and lets her be angry and a mess and takes her on a life changing journey and saying anything more about that would be a spoiler. Actually, Kouru’s far from the only character in this book who’s a bit of a mess and that’s amazing. Is there anything more Star Wars than that?
Those characters created for the book are also absolute delights. Ekiya, one of my personal favorites, feels like she would be perfectly at home both within this Star Wars world and like she could easily appear in another Star Wars story. It’s the Traveler though who will probably be one of the characters most talked about in the weeks to come. They’re a bit of an enigma and purposefully so. They are also undoubtedly one of the main reasons why readers will want to immediately start a second read through of the book once they reach the final page. I’d happily read more stories about them.
Oh. And also? I know I said this about another recent Star Wars book but Ronin is such an unapologetically queer Star Wars book that reflects the world around us with its characters in a way that Star Wars hasn’t historically done well with. In particular, it makes brilliant strides forward for the galaxy in terms of nonbinary and queer rep. The Traveler, one of the novel’s main characters, is nonbinary and one of the supporting characters is clearly written as being trans which just might be a first for Star Wars. That’s not where the queer rep ends but we’ll let you discover the rest for yourselves. But also let’s be clear that this is all: 1) lovely (and not unexpected) to see within this book and, 2) something we hope won’t need to be pointed out so caringly and excitedly in Star Wars story reviews in the future. In the mean time though… I am happy to embrace and celebrate all of these new queer characters in the Star Wars galaxy.
Ronin is special. It’s not special just because of its connection to Star Wars Visions but rather because of what it does for Star Wars. It throws open the doors of what a Star Wars book can do within its pages and if we’re lucky, future Star Wars authors just might walk through them. Del Rey did damn good by getting Emma Candon to write this book and we can only hope we’ll get to see them in the galaxy far, far away again.
Oh. And just in case it wasn’t already clear? You’re going to want to pick up Ronin when it comes out on October 12th. Trust me on that one.
Thank you to Del Rey for providing a copy of the book for review purposes.
