Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I wouldn't exactly say that I had the highest of hopes for Aftermath. After all, it's been a long time since I truly enjoyed a Star Wars novel. Like many of you, I'm sure, I devoured Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy as it was released, but subsequent books in the EU left me flat. The authors didn't seem to understand Star Wars in any meaningful way. So when the EU was swept under the rug (and by "the rug," I mean the Legends banner) I'll admit that I didn't mourn it. There were novels here and there that I treasured, but for the most part every novel took me further and further away from the GFFA that I so dearly loved. With Aftermath being the first post-Jedi novel in the new canon, I was looking for a fresh start. A new direction, with more oversight. Sadly, this book reads like little more than a poorly plotted work of fan fiction that reminds me of the worst of the EU, written by an fan who either doesn't get or wasn't allowed to infuse the book with any of the elements that make Star Wars different from every other work of fantasy or space opera. Before I dig into the bad, first a few nice words about the book and its author. Aftermath does add elements of diversity that Star Wars has been (for the most part) lacking. And it doesn't do so in an overtly political way. Some of the characters are simply gay, and that's that. They aren't romanticized or villainized for that fact. They simply are, and it adds a nice touch to a story that doesn't have nearly enough nice touches. I also found myself at times captivated by Wendig's gift for prose. There are, here and there, passages that I found myself reading more than once, simply for the enjoyment of the writing. Sadly, those passages are few and far between. Much has already been written about the present-tense style of the novel, which I don't have a problem with in and of itself. I do take issue, though, with the choppiness of most of it, the misused and abused punctuation, the literary laziness of it all. It seems at times that fully half of the text consists of hackneyed similes that follow the form "[noun] [verbs] like a [random Star Wars noun pilfered from Wookieepedia]." Heads can't simply ache; they must feel like they've been stepped on by an Imperial Walker. As if the reader needed some constant reminder that he or she was reading a Star Wars book. Which may be the case, because there's little else in the book that really has anything to do with the aesthetic, the tone, or the themes of Star Wars. The dialogue misses the mark by a parsec. At one point the bounty hunter Dengar actually says, "I was putting away bounties while you were still in your space diapers." Space diapers? Really? There are two possibilities here: either Dengar means that he was putting away bounties while his foe was performing EVAs in zero G, or all children in the Star Wars galaxy wear some sort of futuristic diapers. In which case, wouldn't they still just call them diapers? At another point in the book, a character utters the phrase, "I don't like this plan. It sucks. It sucks the fumes from a broken speeder bike. It sucks the vapor from the hindquarters of a gassy eopie." The same character, by the way, also quips at another point, "Thanks, Darth Obvious. Or is it Emperor Palpable?" There's also the Imperial pilot who growls, "You killed NK-409. He was a friend. You rebel [scum]." I kid you not. Far more offensive, though, are the few lines of dialogue given to Han Solo, whose only appearance in this book seems engineered to set up his activities in another (hopefully more interesting) book. Every word that he utters reads as if it were written by a precocious child playing with his Star Wars action figures. Not one of them resembles in any way anything that Han Solo would actually say. Beyond that, there's a repetitiveness to the book that makes me suspect it was quickly written and barely edited. I lost count of how many times I stumbled across the word "prig," often used to describe the noses of characters, and I swear to the Force if one more Wookiee had *ululated*, I would have given up and just read the spoilers for the book instead of slogging through it. Which is a shame, because I really get the sense that Wendig has talent. Despite how much I loathe this book, I'm curious to see what his other books are like. In the end, though, I wish I had simply read the spoilers rather than torturing myself to finish Aftermath. Had anything interesting happened in the book, I might have been able to forgive all of the above, but the sad truth is that the plot goes nowhere and the characters are utterly forgettable. If this one is indicative of the shape of things to come, I don't have much hope for the new, canonical Expanded Universe.