I thought this book was pretty decent. I love how it delved deeper into Thrawn’s backstory and made his rise through the ranks of the empire to be really compelling. In fact, I would say that this particular character was just really well-done overall. His backstory seems believable, the way he saw his problems is actually really cool and innovative, and I just love his intelligence and that the book is able to make that into something that makes both the book and the main character more interesting as a result. It’s so much fun watching the main character reason through problems in really creative ways. I also liked that the book is still mostly consistent with the Thrawn Trilogy… I honestly love those books in the fact that this particular novel stays in line with most of that material is really good.
The writing style was also really effective and did a great job of conveying the emotions of the characters were also given us a solid understanding of the environment.
I even thought the governor character was pretty interesting…despite the fact that in Star Wars she is really boring. So the fact that they were able to make the governor character interesting and dare I say compelling is a huge accomplishment, to say the least. I also thought that Mark Thompson did a great job of narrating the characters. I think he is probably one of the best audiobook narrators ever.
I also liked the Night-swan character that serves as the villain for the entirety of the book. Well, he wasn’t like super amazing… I still felt that he got the job done and actually was an interesting character to drive the book forward well having great chemistry with the main protagonists.
However, the book wasn’t perfect. For one thing, the pacing was kind of sub-par and I thought that there were a number of times read the book just felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. I also wasn’t a fan of the fact that The story at times was kinda hard to follow. I mean it wasn’t super convoluted, but I felt like the story could’ve been streamlined in a more emotional manner.
Final verdict:
Overall the book was pretty good. The main characters were interesting, the writing was really good, the voice narrator was excellent, and I thought the villain was effective. However the pacing was trash sometimes, and the story was occasionally hard to follow.
In fact, I like this book so much time gonna read the next book. With this in mind, I’d give this book 3.88/5.00 stars – an above average Star Wars story that more than compensate for its flaws and ends up being an overwhelmingly enjoyable adventure through and through. As a prequel to the Thrawn trilogy, it gets the job done and it more than enhances the character and justified why I liked him in the first place.
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