Well, I finished my second Star Wars book, and this one, Star Wars: Before the Awakening by Greg Rucka, is in the reconfigured, now canon series. Before going into this book, I already knew that it was geared more towards "young adults" and I was alright with that fact. The reviews over on Amazon were positive and I figured for the low-low price of whatever low price I paid for the book, it would be worth it. And I would say that for the most part it was.
Before the Awakening is a relatively short collection of three short stories from the perspectives of Finn (FN-2187), Rey, and Poe and each story takes place over the course of a couple of months to just under a year (depending on the story) and all take place before The Force Awakens. One thing that I have noticed (in the now two Star Wars books that I've read) and my biggest critique of the entire book, is the the lack of character descriptions and frequent name dropping without descriptions. Had I not seen the movie, or looked at the cover and illustration per story, I would not know what any of the chapter characters looked like, I would not know that BB-8 (spelled phonetically as Beebee-ate, which I found rather distracting, but I assume that it was supposed to be similar to the spellings used for Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio) was a small droid in the general shape of a ball, or that it had a white base with orange highlights. Throughout the book, I found myself Googling what a "Maxima-A heavy cruiser," a "Lancer" class frigate, a "Dissident class light cruiser" and what a Ghtroc 720 ship looked like. No descriptions of any kind. And only from watching the movie did I assume what a "Luggabeast" (on Jakku) was based on the context in the story. I felt that because this is a Star Wars book, that the reader must already know what various ships, and alien species are and what they look like. It was like finding your self on the outside of an inside joke and you have to look up the context and the punchline yourself.
The first story, being Finn's, I will say that I was initially afraid that he was going to be referred to as "Finn" as opposed to FN-2187, which would not make any sense story-wise as he was given that name by Poe during the movie, which takes place before the movie and Finn even says that all he'd ever been called was "FN-2187." This possible anachronism was thankfully avoided. As I was telling Dellaños this last weekend, FN-2187's story felt a lot like the clone centered stories in The Clone Wars TV series, which felt very appropriate since audiences have never seen Stormtrooper training on screen. In this story, there was no explanation given for the "FN" prefix, which I had just assumed was simply part of their serial number, possibly a "lot" number rather than having identifications such as ST-2971654755201, considering how many Stormtroopers the Empire and now First Order must go through if/when a Star Destroyer were to go down.
In Rey's story, the problem with writing prequels after a movie is made, I feel will frequently run the risk of creating events that are significant in the characters life that are never mentioned or referenced in the movie because those stories had not been conceived yet. However, if the stories being told have no emotional weight or bear no significance to the development of the character, the reader is going to question why they are even reading the story in the first place. One aspect of Rey's story I liked was how much importance it placed on the scavengers of Niima Outpost of finding scrap parts from downed ships. There was even tidbits about the prevailing religion around Niima (although how far spread this religion was on the whole of Jakku was not made clear), which I enjoyed.
Poe Dameron's story offered snip-its of The Resistance, its relation to the New Republic and their frustrations with the New Republic not recognizing the growing presence of The First Order. It also offered the most in the terms of character backstory, which made sense since FN-2187, as per the movie, was taken away from his family when he was a baby and Rey was "left" on Jakku when she was a youngling.
As referenced earlier, Poe's chapter was the one where I ended up looking up most of the Star Wars-y ships. I knew what X-Wings, A-Wings, and Star Destroyers were, but that's about where my knowledge ends by names alone.
As a whole, Before the Awakening was a pretty decent and very fast read (and I'm typically a slow-ish reader). It contained little bits about the Star Wars universe 30 some odd years after Return of the Jedi that were not covered in The Force Awakens. None of the stories offered answers to any of the "big" Enquirer-type questions raised by The Force Awakens either, so while I do recommend this short collection of short stories, I would not go into it expecting any revelations anywhere near The Empire Strikes Back.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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