★★★★ (4.4 of 5)

• Full Title: Solo: A Star Wars Story
• Author: Mur Lafferty
• Year: 2018 (mine was 2019 mass market paperback)
• Pages: 324*
• Genre: Sci-fi/Fantasy
• Publisher: Del Rey
• ISBN 978-1-9848-1928-4 (mass market paperback)
• Wookieepedia page (novel)
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* not including excerpt from another book)

 

Summary

This is the novelization of the 2018 film of the same name, the updated canonical version of Han Solo’s backstory (superceding 1997’s Han Solo Trilogy, which superceded The Han Solo Adventures of 1979-80). I was happy to have seen the film first, which made it far easier to visually imagine some of the side characters like Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), Val (Thandie Newton), and Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) — and even the main characters Han (Alden Ehrenreich), Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), and Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover).

The story begins with Han and Qi’ra as teenagers on Corellia, as they attempt to escape a local street gang (Han succeeds, Qi’ra is stuck), resulting in Han joining the Imperial Navy as a flight cadet. During a battle, Han meets and joins Beckett’s criminal group, simultaneously freeing and befriending Chewbacca. After their next score goes bad, Han and Beckett appease criminal overlord Vos by promising an even bigger score on the next job — which is where they meet Lando and lay eyes on the Millennium Falcon. Qi’ra, now working for Vos, comes along to keep an eye on things. Everything goes wrong, just enough for the reader/viewer to see the expected emergence of the more mature Han Solo.

 

Praise

Despite working hard to erase much of what used to be canon, this story still hits a lot of fan-service points for anyone familiar with Han Solo. The book reads like a print version of the film — one of the tightest novelizations I’ve ever experienced — and thus is really good (Solo is my second-favorite film in the Star Wars universe, after Rogue One).

Maybe the best thing about this book/film is how it shows Han’s development from scrappy street thief into the (apparently) calm and self-assured veteran smuggler and star pilot that we all met in 1977’s A New Hope. We see clearly how he tried on and discarded various affectations, finally settling on the thin veneer of smug overconfidence that (barely) masks desperation, fear, and loneliness — while still somehow remaining a good guy inside that even he doesn’t recognize.

 

Points Off For...

The book suffered from a pronoun problem, especially with “he”. Since it switches perspectives from character to character (most of whom are male), the reader is often left to wonder which male is being referenced by each “he”. I counted at least a dozen spots where I wasn’t sure who “he” was. (Most of them are resolved by reading on, but a few of them never clarified for me.)

One fault, of both the movie and the film, was the implication that Qi’ra was irredeemable because of “what she’d had to do”, which later turns out to be that she’d been forced to kill someone. All the while, she is surrounded by males who have repeatedly killed other people, either while committing crimes or during war, or both. I assume most readers/viewers agree that ending another person’s life is pretty serious, yet we’re supposed to overlook that for the majority of characters while reserving the serious reflection for Qi’ra alone?

 

Conclusion

Along with Alexander Freed’s novelization of Rogue One, this is one of my two favorite Star Wars books. Would it stand up without the film? I can’t be sure, but I think so. If anything, it made me want to watch the movie again, which is probably the whole point of novelizations (aside from making money).

 

 

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