Tales of the Bounty Hunters

"Everyone dies. But since nobody's paid me to kill you...sleep well."

My husband is slowly fulfilling his dream of seeing me read all his Star Wars favorites from before things got all weird in the universe. He told me going in that these were a bit of a mixed bag, but that he loved reading them when he was (much) younger. I have to agree with him on the mixed bag part. Dengar's story was a straight up 5 for me, and the rest kinda hovering around 3 or 4. I averaged the scores and ended up at a 3.8. I rounded up. I'll summarize my more specific feelings about the stories here in spoilers:

Therefore I Am/IG-88's Story - Fun, but kind of a letdown. I was mildly surprised at how easily these assassin robots were taken down, despite there being four of them. Them basically taking over a factory planet was fantastic though. The IG-88 bots themselves were kind of boring as a story character though, being robots and all. Not a lot of moral grey there.Payback/Dengar's Story - Holy cow I loved this one. If you had told me going in there'd be a love story like Lu Bu/Diao Qian in the Star Wars universe, I probably wouldn't have believed you. This one made me feel things, and I thought it was sweet and intense all at once. This one alone made reading the entire book worth it for me.The Prize Pelt/Bossk's Story - Meh. A bit to binarily good/evil. Bossk was almost comically evil throughout the whole thing, what with his booby traps and wookiee skinning and all. Lots of infodumps about Trandoshans too. Dunno, this one didn't do much for me. Fun and all, but forgettable.Of Possible Futures/Zuckuss & 4-LOM's Story - Better than the previous one, but I ended up more invested in seeing how the rebels got off their ship (super easy, as it turns out) than the bounty hunting. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize 4-LOM showed up in the Jedi Academy books I already read. Kind of interesting how he's able to rewrite himself so well, and kind of a fun ending too. I felt a bit happier inside knowing Zuckuss got his lungs.The Last One Standing/Boba Fett's Story - Two middle aged men who once were something but now aren't trying to pretend like they aren't aging with families/injuries and are still the young men they used to be. Boba Fett is cool here, don't get me wrong, but there's a vibe of "shit I'm too old for this" throughout the entire book that seemed like nice progression. Lots of weird time jumps though, like the writer wanted to cram in a ton of references people would recognize and damn the story in the process. Disjointed, and what was that (lack of) ending?

Fun, flawed, and mostly enjoyable. It doesn't have to be perfect to be worthwhile to spend time with. Dengar's story alone made this whole thing worthwhile to me.