Hello friends, two new Star Wars books have come out in the past few weeks and naturally I’ve read them. Here are my thoughts about both:

Planet-Sized Spoilers Ahead!!!

Legacy, by Madeleine Roux. This is the one that I was really looking forward to. It takes place between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, and focuses on Leia and Rey. Rey has the broken Skywalker lightsaber and feels the need to fix it so she can use it to help the Resistance against the First Order. She’s also feeling the pressure of being the last Jedi and expectations of saving the galaxy and rebuilding the Jedi Order (who wouldn’t?). She’s also reeling from her last encounter with Kylo Ren and their Force connection. She’s been pouring over the ancient Jedi texts she got from Ach-To and with the help of C-3PO, finds information about an ancient “forge” on the planet Tython. She decides to go there to find it and reforge the lightsaber.

She intends on going alone, or at least with C-3PO, but then Leia decides she’s going to go as well. Leia has got her own troubles, as she’s very recently lost both her husband and her brother, and continues to deal with the pain of losing her son to the dark side; not to mention the very precarious position the Resistance is in right now, after the narrow escape from Crait. But she feels responsible for Rey and feels she can help in some way, as she did (briefly) train as a Jedi with Luke decades ago. Rey is impatient and feels a little weird around Leia, considering the connection she has with Kylo, but Leia is insistent, so off they go.

Near the planet, they run into some refugees from Hays Minor that are in trouble with the First Order: two young men, Gavrin and Ziff. Rey and Leia help them get down to the planet, where Gavrin’s father, Lijar, is with more refugees who are posing as members of the Church of the Force. Lijar himself is an actual, enthusiastic member, who is excited about the Jedi temple remains nearby. Gav and Ziff, not so much. They’re fresh off a vigilante mission to assassinate a First Order Major who helped destroy their home of Hays Minor, a mission that went horribly wrong and Gav was severely injured. When they learn that Rey is a Jedi, they want her to help them seek vengeance on the Major and save one of their own, who is to be executed soon. Of course, Rey and Leia refuse, seeing the rashness and futility of such a move. This only proves to them that the Jedi are not what they are hyped up to be.

Rey and Leia focus on the Temple and what it can tell them. Rey is impatient to get to the “forge,” not seeing that it’s actually a metaphorical forge for the Jedi who went there. Because of Tython’s strong connection with the Force, both Rey and Leia have strange dreams and visions while there. Leia has dreams of what might have been, had she continued her Jedi training with Luke. She dreams of being a powerful Jedi who stops the First Order before they can destroy Hosnian Prime (in the dream, she literally pulls apart a Star Destroyer with the Force, lol). Rey, on the other hand, dreams of her dark self, the one we see in TROS, the one who embraces the darkness within herself. She also sees Ben/Kylo, a what-if scenario of if she’d taken his hand and joined him. In the meantime, they find some holotapes of the ancient Jedi who lived and worked there nearly 5,000 years ago. Something bad had happened here; a Sith woman came to the temple to try to come back to the Light; it’s not clear exactly what happened, but it didn’t work out well–there’s evidence of a battle.

Anyway, in the meantime, we see First Order Major Brilla Wolstenholme in the aftermath of her assassination attempt. She survived only because Kylo Ren happened to arrive at the right time and saved her. She wants revenge on the rebels who tried to kill her, but is sent to the planet Chespea, an awful backwater where she and others are nearly killed by the wildlife there. She embarks on a near-mad journey to find Gavrin and Ziff, but in the process finds out that the First Order actually set up the assassination attempt to show Kylo Ren–and herself, at first–as a hero, to boost morale. But after the parades, they tried to get rid of her on Chespea. This is a woman who willingly joined the First Order as a child and was a devoted disciple; their betrayal cut deep. At one point she could have just disappeared and started over, but she couldn’t let it go and went back to the First Order, who promptly arrested her.

Back on Tython, Rey keeps resisting the darkness within her, constantly running away from it instead of facing and accepting it. At one point she climbs up a cold, snowy mountain just to get away, but then finds she’s stuck there, near-freezing. Someone comes along to help her–the Force ghost of Anakin Skywalker (which was a suprise, but a welcome one, lol). He tells her that she’s not alone, that she can’t do everything alone. He himself tried to fix everything by himself, and well, it didn’t work. She manages to get off the mountain and back to Leia, and she tells her about her connection to her son. That secret had been a barrier between them.

Leia herself has had Force ghost visits by her brother Luke, who helps her with her dreams, but also tells her that Rey is Palpatine’s blood. Leia decides not to tell Rey right now, as she feels it would just push her further over the edge; she’s clearly dealing with her darker self in the place.

Anyway, it all comes to a head when Ziff, clearly the more angrier of the two rebels, goes off and makes a deal with the First Order: he’ll lead them to the Jedi and General Organa, but they have to bring the Major. There’s a confrontation with Ziff in the temple and he accidentally shoots a little girl named Meepka, and Rey, with a new confidence, heals her and the crystal at the same time. While she does this, she has a Force vision of putting Dark Rey and Kylo Ren away for now, telling them goodbye. She’ll deal with them later.

They manage to get away just in time, but the Major blows up herself and Ziff in the end.

There’s A LOT more than what I’ve written here, obviously, but I loved the book because it shows how Rey and Leia get to the point of their relationship we see in TROS. We go from the ending of The Last Jedi, with the Skywalker lightsaber broken and Leia and Rey not really knowing each other too well, to Leia being her Master, the lightsaber fixed, and Rey able to Force-heal. There are a lot of questions that hovered between these two movies that get answered in this book. Some may complain that that there’s not enough “action” or planet-hopping, but I like that these characters get to slow down a little bit and digest all that’s happened to them, and have all these important conversations. It’s much more character-driven, which are the kinds of books I really like.

If you like Rey and/or Leia, the Sequels, the Jedi, and character-driven books, this one’s for you. If you’re not a fan of these things, you may not enjoy it. But I loved it and give it:

4 out of 5 Lightsabers

Eyes Like Stars, by Ashley Poston. This is the first Star book presented as a “romance,” and at first I thought I probably wouldn’t bother reading it, since it’s not my area of interest. I do like some romance in my Star Wars; it would be super dull if there wasn’t any, but not necessarily front and center. Lost Stars by Claudia Gray is about the closest I want to come to Star Wars romance.

BUT–I was waiting for Legacy to come out and was slogging through Shadowfall, and felt I needed a quick Star Wars read. So I checked it out, and guess what? It’s pretty good! Definitely in the YA romance department, with two young people who are thrown together under dangerous circumstances and naturally start falling for each other. It’s a very fast read; I got through it in two days, lol.

Ardent (if that’s not a romance heroine’s name, I don’t know what is, lol) works on the tour ship that belongs to her father, and is content to live her life on its predictable decks and predictable itinerary. While docked in Coruscant one day, she looks for a holotape of a romance series in a seedy part of town, where things get very complicated. She finds the tape, but when she leaves she realizes she left with something that she didn’t pay for (an old astrolabe) and brings it back to the shop. When she gets there, a young man is in trouble with some First Order officers. They’re after an old broken lightsaber he has in his possession, and she helps him get away. Sian, the young man, convinces her to let him stow away on the ship to get away from them, and he’d disembark on the first stop. But of course, things don’t go according to plan.

I won’t go deep into plot details, but it’s fairly interesting. I like how Ardent has a latent talent for “astrogating,” like her mother–no computer navigation, just getting somewhere through hyperspace with their minds, kind of like the Skywalkers from the Thrawn novels, clearly using some form of the Force to find their way through the stars. Her mother had died when Ardent was eight years old while astrogating, and her father won’t let her use it or learn about it anymore. He’s put a lot of pressure on her to continue the family business, just assuming that’s what she wants. Her older brother had left three years prior, chafing at the confines of the ship and their father, so the business would fall to Ardent. She always thought that was exactly what she wanted, but since meeting Sian, she’s not so sure. And when her brother shows up again on the ship, acting weird and snooping around, things just get more fraught.

I think the love story hits all the marks that romance fans are looking for. I enjoyed the book, but again, it’s not really my thing. There were enough “Star Warsy” things in it to make it a fun read for me, but I’ll give this one:

3 out of 5 Lightsabers