Continuing our month of Star Wars reviews, I wanted to take a look at 1994’s The Crystal Star by Vonda McIntyre, which picks up five or six years after Return of the Jedi.
There’s a lot of Expanded Universe books that got into some very deep subjects; topics that questioned the nature of morality, power, responsibility, and honor.
This is not one of those books.
It’s really just a fun adventure. The bad guy is completely rotten, the good guys fight the good fight, and there’s aliens all over the place. We get disguises, renegade Jedi, betrayal, brainwashing, world-ships, and centaurs. How could it not be fun?
In short: Han, Luke and C-3PO travel to a strange planet where rumor says they might find Jedi in hiding. They meet up with a woman who quite possibly broke Han’s heart back in his smuggling days.
Meanwhile Han and Leia’s kids are stolen by the bad guys, and while Leia and Chewbacca head out to find them, the twins use all the experience and Jedi powers that a pair of five-year-olds could ever hope to have.
Luke falls under the thrall of someone wielding not-the-Dark-Side-but-something-similar (Luke spends a lot of time looking weak and haggard, but at least he doesn’t pass out as much as he did in Children of the Jedi.) He actually pulls his light-saber on Han a couple times, which is shorthand for “he’s not in his right mind the Jedi has lost it everybody run!”
In case you think I’m making fun, I’m really not. (Well, not much anyway.) I loved this book the first time I read it, and it holds up on the re-read 20 years later.
Leia’s arc was my favorite in the book: to find her children she goes undercover as a bounty hunter, and she tries to think like her imaginary bounty hunter creation to be more convincing. After a while she convinces herself. She’s not crazy, exactly, but every time the familiar Leia personality pipes up, the bounty hunter stomps on her until she’s quiet. It’s fun to watch.
It’s not a perfect book, certainly, but the flaws are forgivable. Sometimes a piece of knowledge is dropped in without any exposition, and all the characters nod with an “oh yes that big event that everybody knows about that was so important” attitude, which is a little jarring.
Three-quarters of the way through the book Jacen reveals he had brought a bat (the flying kind) with him from the previous planet: it hadn’t been telegraphed beforehand, and it didn’t add anything to the plot, so I’m not sure why it was there. Possibly to emphasize the fact that he likes animals, but we already knew that.
And the writing style took some getting used to; I forgot that it’s worded in a much more simple and straightforward way than Timothy Zahn’s books. When it’s from the twins point of view it makes sense (they’re only five after all) but Leia and Han’s thoughts come across as a little flat sometimes, but not enough to be too distracting.
(There’s also a bit where a supporting character tells the story of her ex-lover: the phrase “I will tell you his name” is repeated over and over. It comes off as pretty silly now, but 20-years-younger-me thought it was deliciously dramatic.)
But looking past that, after so many years of Expanded Universe books it’s easy to forget that this is one of the first handful of books that established the personalities and strengths of Jaina and Jacen. Her ability with mechanics and his affinity with animals are all shown here. Their lives changed so much later on, but this is where we see her using her multitool, where we see him befriending normally dangerous animals without a second thought..
It’s sad to see them of course, knowing that they’re non-canon. But they still exist, in the way all alternate universes exist. And they were a huge part of what kept Star Wars alive in “the dark times” between movies. Canon or non-canon, this is one of the books that’s still worth a read.
“…I was taught to respect you –”
“That’s a start –”
“– as an enemy.”
Han grinned his lopsided grin. “A weird start, but a start all the same. Come on, kid. Let’s get out of here.”