The End of the Aftermath Trilogy

My one word reaction to Empire's End, the last book in Chuck Wendig's Star Wars: Aftermath trilogy: WHAT?!

I've mostly been reading these Star Wars books in isolation because I don't think that anyone I know really reads them and usually the online comments I come across are fairly brief--but this time I think I might have to go look up the more detailed things that people online are saying about this book. It may have given us more questions than answers, or maybe it just left us at the same place as we were before--but it gave left one stunning little scene of apparent insignificance that could have potentially plot-changing significance (I'll talk more about this below).

As I mentioned before, I didn't overly love the first book in this trilogy, but the second one was pretty good. So was this one. This book is basically the lead up to and then the Battle of Jakku. So that in itself is fascinating to read, after we've seen the, well, aftermath of that battle in The Force Awakens. And not only were the scenes with Han and Leia nice (and the coming of baby Ben!), but by this point I found myself invested in the Aftermath team of Norra, Temmin, Bones, Jas, Sinjir, etc. They're an interesting set of characters in an equally interesting setting, and that makes the Aftermath trilogy worth a read.

Now for some spoilers into the plot of this book and into speculation on the upcoming films.

The Aftermath Picks Up the Pace

Click here to read my thoughts on the first installment in the Aftermath trilogy. 

Last fall we had many books released as part of the Journey to the Force Awakens campaign, including Chuck Wendig's Aftermath. While the campaign was exciting, that book was hard for many of us to get into, due in some part to the extensive Interludes showing lots of characters and lots of settings without necessarily uniting it all. And it didn't deliver as much of a prelude to Episode VII as I had hoped for.

With that said, I wasn't overly excited for the sequel, Aftermath: Life Debt. But it was hard to not enjoy seeing the Millennium Falcon on the cover. So. I got the book and even put another one I was reading on hold in order to read this one right away.

The thing is, there have been so many scattered things going on in my life right now that I just didn't have much time to read. So it's taken me over a month to get through this book. But do you know what? That may have been a good thing because this book was good and it helped to have time to absorb it all better.

I see now that Aftermath wasn't Chuck Wendig's fault: that book's fault was a matter of holding back for later. Life Debt delivered all that its predecessor didn't; if you're hesitating on whether or not to read it, definitely read it. By the time I got to this book, I was getting used to the team introduced in Aftermath and I was starting to like them and their dynamics; the way that they come together isn't entirely unlike the crew in Star Wars: Rebels. I started to care about them, so I was finally interested in what was happening to them. And while Mister Bones seemed so random and weird and I just didn't get him in the first book, I really like him now: he's hilarious and cool at the same time.

While there were still Interludes in Life Debt, there were not nearly as many as before and they also weren't as random. They were connected more to the main events, although not necessarily in obvious ways at first. The Interludes made more sense this time and felt like parts of the story instead of distractions from it.

Ah, yes, and then there are the familiar characters. Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca--and Mon Mothma and General Ackbar, in addition to Wedge Antilles from the first book. They're not just on the sidelines, either; they're a big part of the story, especially the second half. That's both welcome as far as enjoyment and insightful as far as hints of what's to come.

Now for some semi-spoilers below the break.

Much or Not Much Aftermath?

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from Chuck Wendig's Aftermath. Remember, I don't read book summaries/back covers/book jackets of books that I'm already planning to read. So I had no idea who the characters were going to be, what the plot would be, or even what the timeline would be.

And you know what? I feel like I still don't know much about Aftermath even after reading it.

When I was, oh, around halfway through or so, I called the book "scatter-brained." If you've read it, you know what I mean. While the basic plot follows a small handful of characters, jumping back and forth between perspectives and sides, there are also "Interludes" between chapters that take you to separate planets, characters, and scenes. These Interludes are basically showing what is going on in the rest of the galaxy in very brief glimpses that barely give you time to remember a completely new set of characters, only to have that new set of characters disappear again after two pages. They're the type of glimpses that would maybe work better in a movie than a book: it would be easier to see these quick scenes play out than to have to follow them while reading.

What's even odder is that, for all these little scenes added in to give relevancy to the main story, this book felt rather irrelevant. Yes, most of the focus is on characters we've never met before, but I don't think that's the problem: a book gives enough time to develop new characters and get the readers to care about them. I think by the end of the book, I did care . . . enough about these characters. But the story just felt like it was hanging in space, detached from everything rather than conveying everything.

I complain also because this book was so highly marketed, more than the other Star Wars books I've read so far. It's part of the "Journey to the Force Awakens." It's supposed to show what happened after the destruction of the Death Star and lead us in to Episode VII. Maybe it did that--but it's hard to tell what it did right now. Like I said, it's like this book is floating right now without anchor; after all, it is the first book of a trilogy and perhaps after we've seen Episode VII and the rest of this book trilogy comes out, we'll have more context.

Right now, it's like this book was just 370 pages devoted to saying that the destruction of the Death Star didn't mean the immediate death of the Empire and that there was still work to do in a divided galaxy, with people on both and any and all sides of the matter for any and all reasons. And from what we've seen of Episode VII, it looks like that's an important fact to remember going into the new movie. But if that was all these 370 pages were here for, well, I feel like something was missing. The book wasn't terrible (I didn't hate it like some people seem to), but it just didn't deliver all that I wanted or was expecting it to.