Category: Opinion

The introduction of this piece is spoiler-free. If you don’t want details of Shadow Fall a warning will let you know when to stop.

Anyone who’s read an Alexander Freed Star Wars novel has some idea of how Shadow Fall is going to go. We expect a gritty, realistic look at war with some hefty emotional pain for the characters (and the readers!). Underscoring that expectation, Del Rey promoted this second book in the Alphabet Squadron trilogy with the phrase “victory has a price”. It certainly does.

War changes people. Though the Empire falls relatively quickly in comparison to the Expanded Universe’s version of the story, we know from stories like Shattered Empire, Battlefront II, and the Aftermath trilogy that a lot of traumatic things can happen in the year of warfare after Return of the Jedi.

Shadow Fall continues the action from the first book in the trilogy, beginning in medias res with a campaign to take a single Deep Core star system from the remnants of the Empire in order to bait Alphabet Squadron’s nemesis, Shadow Wing. The bulk of the action takes place on the urban world of Troithe, something like Coruscant’s forgotten sibling. The conflict is narrow and intense, and allows us to focus on our core cast of characters who were introduced in the past novel: the members of Alphabet Squadron, and their antagonists in Shadow Wing.

The fighting in this book isn’t pretty. What our characters go through – and have to do in order to win – is not pretty. Victory has a price, and this applies to the heroes as much as the villains. If they want to win, they’ll have to do things that they’d scarcely imagined doing in the earlier days of the war. Don’t expect a fun pilot romp interspersed with tragedy the way an Aaron Allston X-Wing novel might make us laugh and cry. There is precious little laughter in this book – which isn’t to say that it’s all darkness and tragedy. But it is definitely intense, and our characters go through hell – and it’s partly a hell of their own making.

That’s the real strength of this book. It’s not just a deromanticized version of Star Wars action and a look at the cost of war. It’s a story about how the traumas of war – both external/military and internal/personal – change people, and what they do when confronted with those traumas. Shadow Fall isn’t an easy read – I had to take my time with it – but it’s worth the investment of time and emotional/mental energy.

Article will contain spoilers after this point! If you have not yet finished the novel and do not wish to be spoiled, come back to the rest of the article later!

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There’s a certain type of Star Wars film-adjacent novel that I like to call a “movie explainer.” Best exemplified by the Darth Plagueis novel of the Legends era, it’s a book that has its own story but also seems to some readers to “fix” or “explain” a film in a way not seen on screen. Sometimes people want Star Wars books to do this – we’ve all seen the tendency recently to want movie novelizations in particular to “fix” something people didn’t like in the movie.

There’s another kind of Star Wars film-adjacent novel: the backstory novel. These novels either introduce us to the new characters from the film or they provide more story for characters we’ve just met on screen. The novels around Rogue One are a great example of these – Del Rey’s Catalyst and Disney’s Rebel Rising and Guardians of the Whills were brilliantly well-received introductions and expansions to Rogue One.

Queen’s Peril, by E.K. Johnston, is definitely a movie-adjacent novel – but it’s neither a “movie explainer” nor a backstory novel. It runs partially concurrent to the events of The Phantom Menace and sheds new light on the film, but not out of a desire to “fix” the movie or to add lore for the sake of lore. If you’ve read Johnston’s first Padmé book, Queen’s Shadow, you know what to expect: it’s a novel about Padmé and her handmaidens and their relationship to each other as they navigate the strangeness of Naboo politics. Queen’s Peril adds context and backstory to The Phantom Menace and reinforces how we should’ve seen the film all along. How? By reminding us of one thing: Queen Amidala is the main hero of The Phantom Menace.

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