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551 pages, Hardcover
First published September 4, 2015
I gave one star to Divergent and Hunger Games, and I consider the film Titanic as 194 minutes of my life wasted. In short: I am not the target audience for Claudia Gray's Lost Stars. I am, however, a big Star Wars fan, and have been since almost the beginning (I was 2 in 1977; I caught up as soon as I could, and I have no memories of life before Star Wars). I really want the fictional world of Star Wars to be as good as it can be, and I'm disappointed by books, movies, or other media that don't measure up. The Prequel Trilogy was a trial, and more recently Chuck Wendig's truly awful novel Aftermath was a major failure. So even though I'm not the audience Gray was writing her YA romance Star Wars novel for, I still care about that world and what happens in it. Lost Stars, though not as bad as Aftermath, is not a great book.
The idea of a YA romance set in the Star Wars universe is fine, but the execution of this book is flawed in a number of ways--some of which are Gray's fault, and others which are just inherently difficult when writing a novel about Star Wars. One of those inherent difficulties is simply bridging from the movies, which will always be the primary standard for Star Wars, to a novel, which has to do its work through words rather than visual images. Star Wars is primarily a visual story. The beauty and coherence of the visuals overcomes (most) of the illogic of what's really happening, or what is happening just off-screen at various moments. The novelist has a nearly impossible task of translating a visual method of storytelling into words. James Luceno, in his novel Tarkin, does this very successfully; Gray (and most other Star Wars authors I've read) does not. The movies can focus mostly on the action, the moments of intensity and urgency and excitement. So when Gray shows us scenes of little teen romances and joking around happening between Imperial officers in the hallways of the Death Star, it starts to feel a lot more like Star Trek and a lot less like Star Wars. For me, this just feels wrong.
It's clear that one of Disney's purposes in the new Star Wars book canon, leading up to The Force Awakens, is to humanize the Imperials, showing us that they are not entirely evil, even though they serve a thoroughly evil Emperor. I understand why they need to do this, and I don't disagree with that perspective. But taking that perspective already makes the story feel very different from the original trilogy. In those movies, you could imagine that individuals within the Empire were not evil, but basically the Imperials were presented pretty uniformly as either evil or brainless. To have a story that now assures us that just off-screen those same monolithic Imperials were actually joking around, getting drunk, swearing, having one-night stands, etc., is awkward. Gray continually drives in the point that some of the Imperials were upset by the Death Star and other actions of the Empire, but it just makes it more difficult to reconcile how anyone would continue to serve wholeheartedly in the Empire, after witnessing such enormity. In trying to solve the problem of humanizing the Imperials, she has left, or perhaps even enlarged, the problem of how the Empire makes sense in the first place, for anyone.
The YA romance genre is tough to pull off in Star Wars because the author ends up writing sentences that don't seem to fit into that universe at all--sentences like this one: "The soft violet-blue fabric sparkled subtly, and both the short cape and the long skirt flowed around her as if in an unseen breeze" (126). Also, because the YA genre seems to require a certain amount of grunginess in its characters' speech and activities, the Star Wars universe now includes a lot more swearing, sex, and drunkenness than it has before. For me, it didn't feel right, and sentences like this one just take me right out of the story: "Flying into battle with no hope of survival turned out to be the secret to kicking ass" (461). That kind of attitude makes sense in Firefly or The Matrix; not in Star Wars. The kind of contemporary grunge in the young protagonists made them seem, to me, less noble, not characters I particularly cared about.
Probably the most annoying thing for me about Lost Stars was the way that Gray inserted her young characters into many key moments of the original trilogy. On both Death Stars? Yes. On Darth Vader's ship the Executor? Yes. In the battle on Hoth? Yes. And on and on. One of Gray's characters is the Imperial who discovers the danger in the Rebels' attack on the first Death Star; another character is sitting right next to the Star Destroyer gunner who doesn't shot the escape pod at the beginning of Episode 4. This frustrates me first because I think it's a too-easy doorway for a novelist. Rather than fully imagining a new story, she can simply take what's already there and insist that her characters were there all along. But it also bothers me that Lost Stars is part of the new canon of Star Wars, so until Disney wipes the slate clean and starts over again, this is to be understood as what really happened. So what Gray has done, in inserting her characters all over the place in the key points of the original movies, seems almost arrogant. She's grabbed all those "just off-screen" spots forever, putting them in service of a story that, in my opinion, is undeserving.
One of the main reasons people will read books in the new canon right now is to find clues about what will happen in The Force Awakens. As in Aftermath, it seems to me like the hints in this book are rather sparse. The biggest connection is near the end of the book, which presumably explains the crashed Star Destroyer on Jakku seen in the trailers. Of course, this being a Star Wars book, we can't escape at least one utterance of "I've got a bad feeling about this"--on page 424, in this case. I look forward to the day when Star Wars authors don't feel they need to include that line in every single book.