“What’s in there?”

“Only what you take with you.”

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.

Everything isn’t great on Yavin 4 if your last name is Dameron. The relationship between sixteen-year-old Poe and his father Kes has been somewhat fraught since the death of his mother Shara Bey years ago. When Poe’s latest joyride ends in disaster, he finds himself in need of a change. He just didn’t quite expect that change to be piloting a ship for the Spice Runners of Kijimi and all the trouble that comes with it. And he really didn’t expect to end developing a connecting with fellow young Spice Runner Zorii Wynn. Continue reading →