Let me throw this out there: I've read every Star Wars book since the Legends decision was handed down, from John Jackson Miller's "A New Dawn" to this one, including several of the young reader books like Jason Fry's superb "Servants of the Empire" series. And let's get one things straight: "Aftermath" isn't the reboot everyone seems to think is it, the canon's been rebooted for some time. Since AND came out, if not before that. That this is the fist major work of the new canon to be set after Return of the Jedi seems to have laden it with rather unreasonably high expectations.
No, this isn't the new Heir to the Empire. HttE was a singular work of its time, where Tim Zahn basically got to shape the entire universe of the era as he saw fit, where there were no other works (that he acknowledge anyway) shaping what the future would be or what the intervening time had done to shape the characters. He had a blank slate.
Chuck Wendig didn't have that freedom. Characters like Luke, Han and Leia are going to have their adventures told in other books, comics or formats. The ultimate fate of the universe beyond this point is set in the stone that is the fast-approaching film The Force Awakens. There will probably be at least one film set in this time period that's yet to be released, be it the telling of the re-taking of Coruscant by the New Republic or some other turning point where the NR defeated the Empire and scattered its remnants until the events of TFA bring them back together.
So what sort of story can Wendig tell? It's a small-scale one, dealing with the fate of a single planet and focused on a small, rag-tag group of unlikely allies, without any big, major battles or wild lightsaber fights or anything like that. But there are stones being thrown in here, stones that might have a ripple effect through the era of Star Wars "history" far beyond one planet.
Interspersed through that story are snippets of what life is like elsewhere in the Galaxy Far Far Away, of events and people and stories that are being acted out just out of camera shot, as it were. Things like, what is happening to a farmer family when one son sides with the Empire, and the other with the New Republic. Or how the New Republic's attempt to reestablish the Senate is going. Or something as small as the adoption of a war orphan by a couple on Naboo. It's very World War Z, where we get tastes and bites of the larger universe without having it all spelled out at once.
The story itself is good. The characters start out rather bland but gain flesh and dimension as the wringers are put on and they struggle against the Empire and against each other. The unlikely heroes are about as motley a crew as one might expect, with conflict and friction that both illustrates the larger conflict around them, and how the future of the galaxy might be shaping up. The plot has a few twists and turns, but it more of the A New Hope-style rollicking adventure than the Empire Strikes Back of twists and turns. Fitting, actually, for the first part of a trilogy.
A word on the prose: It's a different sort of tone and style than most Star Wars books have been in the past. The story is told in present tense rather than past tense, and the tight third-person perspective lends itself to almost stream-of-consciousness writing at times, choppy and irregular. I didn't mind. Having read other books with similar styles in the past (including other books by Wendig himself) meant the transition was not jarring, and I rather enjoyed having a more narrative voice to the story.
It's different. Not "juvenile" or "sophomoric" as others have railed. It's not somehow "wrong" or "bad" purely because of some stuffed-up notion that a book's style has to be entirely composed of complete sentences, and has to have a florid, verbose vocabulary where everyone speaks like English professors, and has to be in past-tense to be considered "good", or even more ridiculously "real Star Wars".
There is not a Star Wars book in existence that could be considered "good" literature by those sorts of measures. Star Wars is pulp fiction. It's not some great academic work or classic of literature. It's the extension of dime novels from almost a hundred years ago, of visceral, two-fisted adventure tales, of stories that exist so that the reader can have fun.
I had fun with this book. It's not perfect, I could tell that there were things being set up for use later in the trilogy, and I wish some of the characters were given more depth. But it's still a fun, fast-paced read that tells its own complete story while still giving us glimpses of how the rest of the GFFA is dealing with the troubled, unsettled times they live in.
Five Stars doesn't mean I think it'll be the next classic of the genre. It means that I got my money's worth, I enjoyed it while I read it, and I look forward to the next two installments when they come out.
EDIT: I see I need to clarify exactly why I gave this book five stars. Here's my reasoning: numerical and value scoring something so opinion-based as my reaction to a book is bullcrap. Saying that a five-star book has to be an all-time classic of the genre is a false dichotomy, because any reader will wind up with far too many books that with middling scores.
I rate books 5 stars when I enjoy them while I'm reading, they tell a good story well, and I want to read them again after I'm done (which, with Aftermath, I do, I'm partway into my second reading now). I've also rated the Servants of the Empire books five stars along with A New Dawn, because they all meet those same criteria.
Some people's expectations were obviously different from mine, which is fine. That's their opinion, not mine. For me, I enjoyed this book while I was reading it, don't at all regret doing so, and will read it again in the future. Thus: five stars.
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Top 3 Worst Star Wars Novels
I included a picture of my Star Wars Novel collection as a "character reference" I am not going to rant on the fact that Lucas Arts was able to manage all the Star Wars Books, Comics, Games & Movies without them contradicting each other and the mighty Disney found that task to daunting. I just want to point out a few things.Star Wars authors have ranged from excellent (Timothy Zahn) to mediocre (Barbara Hambly). Chuck Wendig would be on the lower end of the spectrum. This book reads like a self published eBook by an aspiring author writing in their part time. The story is poorly developed, it is impossible to figure out who the protagonist is, it rambles around befor never really getting to a point, and it's generally not fun to read. Star Wars is about the charectors more than the force or battles. These charectors are not developed, probably because there are way to many, and they are not endearing in anyway. When people come to me and ask me about it. I say to read the wookiepedia article and only get the book if you are a collector, and then wait until you can pick it up at a garage sale.The Rebels (New Republic) are not killers / torturers. This book portrayed them as not caring about bystanders dying (think Superman) and purfictly willing to torture the enemy to get information. This brings me to the main complaint.Keep your political agenda out of my Star Wars. And yes as a fan it is mine, and if you are a fan it is yours, the goal is to get our money so it is about what we want not some desire to push an agenda artisticly. Three separate refrences to homosexual characters, in an entire galaxy where none has never been mentioned - transparent attempt to push a political agenda. This is not just a right wing vs. left wing thing. The same would be true if it was an extreme conservative philosophy being shoved down the throat of the reader. This is the most glaring example of putting our galaxy into that one. In an early Expanded Universe book Lando introduced Luke to Hot Chocolate and it stood out so much as wrong that authors learned not to do that. Mr. Wendig did not get the message. Use Star Wars lingo: Gundarts, Mynocks, nerf...Conclusion: because I refuse to go back and read Children of the Jedi, Planet of Twilight or The Crystal Star I can not tell you if it is worse than all 3 or slightly better than Children and Twilight. Aftermath is definitely a low point for Star Wars novels, lets hope that this is not what we are going to get from Disney on a constant basis.
Top reviews from other countries
Akshay Nagpure
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Eduardo Starling
parece ter sido feito às pressas
Reviewed in Brazil on January 25, 2018
