This September they're going to be releasing a collection of short stories based around Life Day and other winter festivals called "A Life Day Treasury". It's written by Cavan Scott and George Mann, with art by Grant Griffin. It's going to contain a new The High Republic story featuring Master Stellan on patrol on Coruscant during it's winter festivities.
I earned a $2 credit on Google, so I used to get money off of a purchase of the e-book of the Phasma novel. It was already marked down to $5, so I only ended up spending about around $3. I've been curious to check out some of Dahlia S. Dawson's stuff for a while, so this seemed like a good opportunity to do that.
Just finished Light of The Jedi. I won't bore you all with a full review, but overall I enjoyed it. It helps to understand it's function is mostly to establish the new setting, characters, antagonists, and depict the inciting incident. If it were purely a standalone story and not part of a multi-book, multi-media narrative then I'd have bigger problems with the structure and pacing. Just starting 'Into the Dark' and I'm already liking the characters. Not much else to say at this point though. It's a very good book, though the downside is that it mostly serves to underline just how criminally underused and wasted Phasma was as a character in the movies.
I’m kind of almost at the halfway point of Into The Dark and really enjoying it. I like all the characters and I’m interested to see where the story goes.
Hoopla has gotten both Into the Dark and A Test of Courage, Adventures #1 and The Great Jedi Rescue, but not The Light of the Jedi. Which is kind of bugging me since that's supposed to be the core book for this whole first phase of The High Republic. They do have it on Libby/Overdrive, but since they have a limited number of copies, it's not going to be available for at least 6 months.
I've been trying to get through Light of the Jedi, but its extremely scattershot and, quite frankly, frequently boring. It was a mistake, in my opinion, to try to set up so much of the High Republic Era in this book, they desperately needed to tighten the focus to one or maybe two sets of Jedi. It reads like an anthology book but all about one event. While there are parts of the story and characters that I like, its constantly switching to other, much less interesting POVs, and the scope of the story (saving one system from a mishap) is way too small a scope of a story to have so many different POVs. I think the setting and some of the characters have potential, but overall Light of the Jedi is a pretty rough read for me, I don't know if I'll actually finish it.
https://www.starwars.com/news/war-of-the-bounty-hunters-exclusive Charles Soule is doing a Boba Fett comic story he pitched himself.
It's going to be a big crossover between Star Wars (no subtitle), Doctor Aphra, Bounty Hunters, and Darth Vader, and is supposed to help explain why it took so long for Luke, Leia, and co. to rescue Han from Jabba.
On the face of it, it feels like retreading old ground as they did a very similar thing back in the EU as part of the 'Shadows of the Empire' media campaign. Honestly the premise always kinda stretched credibility for me; I mean Bespin and Tatooine aren't that distant on a galactic scale; how many opportunities would other hunters even have to try and poach the bounty? On the other hand, Charles Soule has a very good track record and has more than earned the benefit of the doubt.
I had the same problem with Light of the Jedi. I liked the concept, the "cast of thousands" approach was fine with me -- basically, it's like a television pilot in book form. But, being a pilot it has problems -- it's heavy on incident to introduce its cast of thousands, but it's light on plot (ie., narrative momentum) and by the time the plot actually kicks in the book's half over. (By that point, my interest in the book was seriously flagging.) It also didn't help that Soule's prose was overwritten and lacked subtlety, so reading Light felt like a chore; there's only so many times you can read about a character thinking/feeling how awesome the Force is, and I felt the prose could have been tightened up by about a third. This is not to say that there weren't things I enjoyed; I liked many of the Jedi characters, and I don't think any Star Wars book has made Coruscant feel like Trantor in quite the same way this one does. Overall, I think I admire it more than I like it, but I'd struggle to give it 3 stars in an Amazon review.
I'm not to surprised The Light of Jedi has turned out that way. Just from all the promotional stuff for it, it sounded like it had a of set up to do. I guess it does seem like kind of a simple premise to base such a big crossover around.
Into The Dark was so good! Reath Silas as a Jedi who didn’t want adventure made for an interesting main character. I loved everyone else too, especially Affie and Leox! The plot was very engaging and I was eager to find out more with every chapter. I hope we get a continuation at some point. Once again Claudia Gray delivers! I have yet to read Bloodline which is another of hers so I’m looking forward to that.
@Reverend I agree wholeheartedly. Shadows of the Empire was excellent. I recently re-read the book again and have been listening to the excellent soundtrack too. Track 8 called "Night Skies" is an excellent mix of the Imperial theme, Vader's theme, Luke's theme, Binary Sunset, with an ominous Vader theme at the end. It reminded me of the orchestral theme at the end of the Mandalorian season 2 finale. I played the hell out of Shadows on the N64 and it was one of 10 titles, I bought in the first three months of owning an N64 in 1996. I liked the fact that Lucas had said Shadows was G canon until Disney. I only wished the novel was longer with the side stories of the comics and game included, especially the bounty hunter fights, playing hot potato keep away with a carbon frozen Solo. I know part of it was in the Excellent Tales of the bounty hunters anthology. I recommend reading that anthology and the Tales of Jabba's Palace for the Fett story too. It's too bad none of the Shadows characters AREN'T a part of the Vintage collection but Amon Nor from NJO was? Stupidly. Go figure. Xizor died too easily. I wanted Xizor to be a force user and a fight with Vader one on one. Perry did a great job with the story, but Xizor's sexual escapades and sleeping with Guri was just downright creepy towards the end. It didn't serve the story. Xizor was acting like a lizard creeper near the end. Needed to go. Dash Rendar looked like Kevin Costner most times. Ditch those stupid 1980s shoulder pads. Rendar needed less of a Solo look, and more original. I'm thinking trench coat and flair, and twin powerful blaster pistols, worn backwards, but keep the Corellian bloodstripe. Rendar needed to one up Solo. Leebo needed more to do in the story. Leebo was 22 years before Lando's L3. Why did Disney leave out the bounty hunters more in the Sequel Trilogy made no sense. Someone needs to do a Oceans 11 with a bunch of bounty hunters in the original trilogy timeline. I never knew Doug Chiang designed the Outrider. What a ship. Just as awesome as the Falcon. I loved the gun turret sequence in the N64 in the Hoth System asteroid field. But, most importantly the Xizor/Vader competition for Luke Skywalker wasn't original to Shadows of the Empire, but was originally in Lucas's 1981 rough draft of Revenge of the Jedi. Cheers all, -Koric
Into the Light is pretty high on my list, I really enjoyed Lost Stars. I just want to get through a few more e-books I own, before I borrow it from Hoopla.
EK Johnston is writing another Padme book, this one takes place right after AOTC https://twitter.com/starwars/status/1362497376800305164
Got the next two High Republic books, Into the Dark and A Test of Courage. I think one is YA and the other is for even younger kids. Shouldn’t take that long to go through
They are going to be doing a Sith focused follow up to The Secrets of the Jedi, The Secrets of the Sith. It's written Marc Sumerak, with art by Sergio Gomez Silvan, and is being done from Palpatine's perspective.