Empire's End

Having finished this first real attempt at post-Return of the Jedi stories in the new canon, I am predictably disappointed.

This new universe doesn't have room for the kind of expansive tales that the now-Legends universe of my childhood did. It's clear that the main characters (Luke, Leia, and Han) are off-limits to the author; they can do nothing notable since their past is reserved for the movie-script-writers. There are no new or innovative villains, but instead simple ones vaguely gesturing toward the future threat of the First Order. There can be no exploration of the nature of the Force, the establishment of a new Jedi order, or exotic alien threats. All of that would interfere with the backdrop for the new movies, and is thus outside the realm of the new EU.

Instead, we get a story about a new set of nobodies pursuing short-term objectives, and accomplishing foregone conclusions. The author tries to make them sympathetic and interesting, but in the end they're not our Star Wars characters from the movies; they're the author's inventions, who we know will not be carried forward unless this particular author writes yet more novels. This can be done well (see the now-Legends Rogue Squadron novels), but in this case it wasn't, perhaps due to Wendig's young-adult-novel writing style.

Given this precedent, I don't see a way forward for the new canon to achieve anything like the breadth and depth of the Legends Universe. The filmmakers clearly want to be unrestricted, leaving the books to fill in their wake instead of interleave into a single shared universe. Books in the new canon may provide an interesting diversion, but they won't recapture what we had.

As such, for fans like me who want an expansive Star Wars universe, it's best we return our attentions to the old Legends universe. We can re-read the stories it provides, while accepting the fact that its timeline will not continue indefinitely as we'd hoped.

Executive Summary: A decent conclusion, but not as good as [b:Life Debt 26895161 Life Debt (Star Wars Aftermath, #2) Chuck Wendig https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1449268300s/26895161.jpg 47250982].Audiobook: I love the Star Wars audiobooks. At least when Marc Thompson is narrating. He does so many voices and really adds that extra something that makes this a mandatory audio selection for me. Ordinarily I'd be opposed to the sound effects and music, as in most audiobooks they seem distracting or make it hard to hear the narration, but once again the people who do the Star Wars books did a fantastic job.Full ReviewThis series was a bit of up and down for me. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I first picked it up. I've never read anything by Chuck Wendig outside of this series. I found [b:Aftermath 25131600 Aftermath (Star Wars Aftermath, #1) Chuck Wendig https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1426620007s/25131600.jpg 44828548] a little underwhelming, although not for the reasons most people did. I thought [b:Life Debt 26895161 Life Debt (Star Wars Aftermath, #2) Chuck Wendig https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1449268300s/26895161.jpg 47250982] was the best of the trilogy, but that this book was better than the first one.This was pitched to bridge the gap between episodes 6 and 7, and I thought by the end it did a so-so job of that. Often times it felt like the main plot was too far removed from the bigger events. Likely this is due to Disney saving it for one of the 500 movies they have in the works. There are some good ties to some of the movies, but not enough for my liking. I think it would have been better pitched as simply a story that takes place in-between the two movies rather than a bridge.I will say Mr. Wendig's original characters really grew on me. It's always tough to come into a series with such well known/loved characters and then proceed to create your own to tell a story. It definitely took awhile for me to warm up to them, but I liked them all by the end of this trilogy. I wouldn't mind seeing them show up again somewhere else.Overall this was a decent series, but easily skippable. If you're looking for some extra Star Wars stories, there are probably some better options out there. If you're a fanatic and just have to read it all, this series was certainly enjoyable enough for me anyways.

Ah, this trilogy. It had a very rough start, but then in books 2 and 3 improved to the point where they became “ok” with a few moments of greatness. Ultimately though, this really didn't need to be a trilogy.

It excels at expanding the universe a bit, telling us what's going on in the galaxy (with interludes and mentions), but it doesn't quite work on the character level. I imagine this ended up being a trilogy so by the end we would at least somewhat care about these characters in the final battle, but I just found them tiring and a bit of a waste. It makes me wish instead this had been a book with only the interludes, maybe expanded a bit, so it'd almost be a short story collection (those interludes are the perfect way to get us to check in with characters we haven't really heard from outside of the movies. One of the interludes in the book is about the ultimate fate of Jar Jar Binks and this was the perfect way/medium to do so). But most of all of course, I wish we'd have gotten characters that would have made the story more engaging.

Of course, not all characters are that bad. Sloane is still the best and Sinjir is pretty cool. Towards everyone else I'm either indifferent or I just don't like them to the point I don't like reading about them. (The latter being most notably Norra and Temmin). In the end, the book works because interesting things are happening, but that alone doesn't elevate the book to being a “must read”.