Star Wars: Lost Stars Review

Lost Stars is the latest Star Wars novel by New York Times best-selling author, Claudia Gray, and is love story across the galaxy between two childhood friends, Thane and Ciena. Both met as children while admiring the Empire’s spacecraft and proceed to train together as they hope to one day captain their own starship.

The story follows them through their training at the Empire’s academy and through their lives as part of the Empire. However, following witnessing the destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star, their faith in the Empire is shaken, with Thane deserting the Empire and eventually joins the Rebellion. Throughout the story, the star torn lovers and brought back together, never giving up hope on one another.

With the story being set over 20+ years, it includes many important moments from within the Star Wars legacy, but from the point of view from the two main characters. The destruction of Alderaan, the destruction of both Death Stars, the battle on Hoth plus a preview of the battle of Jakku.

However while the book does say it includes all-new post Return of the Jedi content and clues about the upcoming Force Awakens movie, it only appears in the last few chapters, but certainly did a great job in building my excitement for the new stories. While we know very little about the battle of Jakku, the front cover image of a Star Destroyer crashing into a planet is a powerful part of the book and I won’t lie, was disappointed that the story had ended right when I got super interested as it started going in a direction that we don’t know about yet.

Along the way, many well known characters including Darth Vader, The Emperor, General Moff, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and many more make brief cameos or mentions. Enough to keep the reader within the Star Wars universe but also the novel approach of being from different points of view.

I really enjoyed reading this book, I was completely emerged in the universe and once the initial characters had been built up, I found it very easy to imagine the story intertwining with the movie storyline. It was very interesting to see how the battles looked from both sides, especially the Empire’s side, how the officers lived and trained. As often the Empire doesn’t show its human side and workers shown as mindless clones. However this book has shown why civilians joined the Empire and how they are treated.

I also liked how Thane didn’t fully get behind the Rebellion at first, how he was wary of “the Force” and even his attitude to characters like Luke Skywalker was more realistic.

This book has stirred up a variety of thoughts about how the new Anthology movies could be done and how good they could be at telling the stories of the Rebels in a more realistic fashion.

The love story aspect was done well, with not too much detail as this isn’t Mills & Boone in space, the differences in culture between the lovers is a constant internal battle for Ciena throughout. Which added much more interest how much she loved Thane but couldn’t let go of her background.

Overall, I loved reading this book, an entire day of my vacation was totally sucked away while I was reading this story and enjoyed every part of it. It’s a fascinating story that gripped my imagination and with a interesting love story and infamous Star Wars iconic moments included, I would happily recommend this book.