Queen’s Shadow is the book I’ve been waiting twenty years to get to read.

When I first saw The Phantom Menace when I was nine years old, I instantly fell in love with not only Queen Amidala but all of her handmaidens too. I learned all of their names (Sabé, Rabé, Eiraté, Saché, and Yané!) and I eagerly consumed every last scrap of information I could find about their characters and even their actresses. Then, when Attack of the Clones came out, I added Dormé, Cordé, and Versé to the list and loved them all too. Eventually, I found my way to the online Star Wars fandom and found other women and teenage girls who also loved the handmaidens. I’m still friends with a few of them to this very day. Despite finding this community, the broader Star Wars fandom didn’t seem to really care about the handmaidens and the disdain of Padmé solidified after Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005. That was almost 14 years ago. Since then, we’ve been mostly deprived of new handmaiden content and Padmé gets spoken about as being less than some of the other Star Wars heroines.

That changes today. Continue reading →