It was the Dark Times. Evil had triumphed, a light had gone out of the world, and people had lost hope.
The destruction of the Jedi? No, I’m talking about how I felt right after Star Wars Episode 3, which is why I’ve never seen an episode of Star Wars Rebels. After the Prequels I pretty much boycotted anything Star Wars-related and sulked.
But I’ve had time to heal, and I have hope for the future (imagine some John Williams music starting in the background) and a ton of people have told me I’m missing out if I don’t watch the show. And I will, especially now that I’ve read Star Wars: A New Dawn, by John Jackson Miller. I thought it was fun, but it’s a book that’ll be a lot more fun for anyone who’s gotten to know and love the characters already.
I’ve heard of the characters before now: the smart-mouthed almost-Jedi Kanan Jarrus and the confident Twi’lek Hera Syndulla, fighting the Empire a few years before the battle of Yavin. That’s all I knew of the story before reading the book, and it turns out you don’t need to know any more than that to understand what’s going on.
They’re joined by two new characters: Sullustan surveillance tech Zaluna (I know that’s the same race as Lando’s co-pilot in Jedi, but I swear I started to think of her as Sadness from Inside Out. I know, silly. But very fun.) and Skelly, an explosives expert from the Clone Wars with a chip on his shoulder.
When both were first introduced, I didn’t expect to like them. Miller expanded them so well you can forget that one was a snoop for the Empire and the other is an annoying sociopath with easy access to explosives.
The snarky comments and witty dialog was my favorite part of the book, it’s what jumped out at me when I read the preview in the Del Rey sampler. Kanan is a complete smartass. He taunts officers of the Empire by pretending to be delighted to see them, and he can’t resist a clever comeback.
…the cyborg was moving toward him again. “Now, where we we? I used to spar in physical therapy.”
“Oh yeah? I used to put people there.”
The supporting characters get their fair share of quips too.
Skelly crossed his arms. “Everyone who called me paranoid, the line for apologies begins to the left.”
And there’s a very quick bit where they’re frantically trying to escape and someone says it’s time to move to Plan 2, and they have a hilarious back and forth about wasn’t the last thing Plan 2, isn’t this next thing Plan 3, and Hera’s desperately trying to get them to focus there’s a fleet of TIE fighters incoming.
The only bump in the storytelling isn’t the fault of the author so much as the fault of the reviewer for reading this before seeing the show. I thought a lot of the conversations, both internal and external, seemed to go on for a long while. Everybody’s puzzling out their motivations, spelling out in detail what the situation means to them.
This kind of thing is catnip to long-time fans of a lot of shows, myself included. We want to find out what goes on in their heads, get some insights that we couldn’t get unless we had chapters and chapters to work with. I’m thinking I would’ve enjoyed the details more if I’d already known everyone for a long time.
The other time the story seemed to skip a beat was in explaining the very convoluted plans of the big bad guy, Count Vidian. His plans were excellent actually, starting from a simple brutish tendency towards destruction and ending up with a long-term plan of being ridiculously powerful and smiting every single one of his enemies. And it made sense.
Several people figure out what’s going on (the book’s too well-written for him to pull a James Bond monologue about his evil plan) and they take the time to explain to each other (and the reader) what it all means. I think there’s some repeats there, where we hear parts of the same explanation a few times, and I think that could’ve been trimmed a little.
But that’s really the only quibble I have. We get space battles and bar fights, sabotage and disaster, cheap theatrics and some actual character development.
A lot of the story is about what gets people to do something, what pushes them that one step too far.
Zaluna was content to just watch, until the events she’d been watching bumped her out of her safe little world. Hera was content to collect information and play it (relatively) safe, until she saw exactly how many people would die. Kanan was content to drink and loaf his way around the universe, until tragedy and loss finally caught up with him. And Skelly…well Skelly was never actually content, so he started chucking bombs at people fairly early on, but everyone’s limit is different.
The payoff was also nicely done. A few chapters before the end we get a neat scene that we’d been waiting for the whole book. And then one chapter later we get the other scene we’d been waiting for. Both were exactly the way I would’ve wanted them to play out.
I really should’ve done this in the opposite order: I should’ve watched the show first and then read this. But having done it the wrong way around, I still liked it, enough that now I have to go watch the show.