Kevin Schlitter
Narrator did a good job bringing the characters to life and making sense of the author's disjointed and frantic writing. No hate for the narrator at all. The author, on the other hand.... The book itself: wasn't the worst thing I've ever read... The author uses lots of short sentences. It seems the only way to enjoy this book would be in audio format. SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT(some worse than others) How many times can a character "die" to come back miraculously after a brief unrelated interlude? I think it might happen 4 times in this book and became predictable and annoying. As others have noted, this book has all kinds of references that would make a Star Wars nerd giddy and make for wonderful descriptions, but doesn't make for believable dialogue. "As Han would say 'fly casual' " would make sense if it was the writer talking directly to the reader, but not as a thought a character is having who wasn't even present when the iconic quote was said. I'm not against homosexuality, and have no problem with it. Nor do I have a problem with strong female leads, people (or aliens) of "color", etc... I do find issue when it seems the write was trying to hard to make a statement rather than just tell avoid story. The most of the main/interesting characters were either black, female, or gay (or all three). There were 5 gay characters mentioned in the book. This seems a it excessive, though perhaps the straight to gay ratio in this galaxy is different than ours? I didn't notice this in the movies, clone wars, other books I've read.... And it isn't just casual mention either. There is a part where they were talking about a orphan who's parents died. I would have accepted: his parents were dead, he was orphaned, or even his dads were dead (note: when mentioning heterosexual couples, rarely will they feel the need to mention the sex of the parents, it's usually just parents) Instead, the author elected to say "his TWO dads were dead" wait to make sure we didn't miss the fact that this boy was indeed raised by a gay couple. This fact adds nothing to the story and I felt was out of place. I could go on about the other sins of this book but I won't.... I am disappointed Disney chose this author to write official canon for Star Wars. James Lucerno would have made a much better choice. To make things worse, this is a trilogy!!!!!! I cannot and will it endure two more of these books to get what appears to be meaningless backstory so far.... I'll skim the wookiepedia later for plot points.