When somebody asks if I’m a Star Wars fan, I never know what to say. Star Wars is too many things to have a single opinion on.
Before discussing Lost Stars, here’s my Star Wars starting point: The original film trilogy was boss, obviously, the Andor series was decent and my smoking hot take is that Rogue One is the best of everything, including the originals. Episodes VII, VIII and IX are a steaming pile of faecal matter and episodes I, II and III only look half-decent by comparison. As for the games, Revenge of the Sith and Battlefront 1 and 2 on the PS2 were outstanding, while the Battlefront remakes were absolute train wrecks. Empire at War was OK and I never played the RPGs – sorry.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk books. There are now over 400 of them(!) and I couldn’t name a single one until last month. Lost Stars is my attempt at rectifying that.
Why Lost Stars?
I’m going to be honest, from the outside, the Star Wars book universe looks like a right bloody mess. Between all the infighting on what’s considered true canon, all the contradictions in lore and history, and just the sheer volume of stories and starting points, getting started is a daunting prospect for a casual fan like me.
In my initial digging, Lost Stars by Claudia Gray regularly gets the accolade of ‘best Star Wars book’ by fans, when they’re not tearing pieces out of each other on Reddit. This will have to do. There’s a lot riding on Gray’s shoulders. If it goes well, I’m looking at a backlog of ~400 new books and I really can’t afford that right now.
The story
Lost Stars opens with two childhood friends – Thane and Ciena – from the planet Jelucan (middle of galactic Bumblefuck, basically). Jelucan has just been incorporated into the Galactic Empire, and our protagonists join the Imperial Academy to train as officers, dreaming of fighting those pesky rebels and making big-daddy emporer proud. I read this book shortly after reading The Nazi Mind, so I’m immediately praising the Empire for mastering the art of corrupting youth, here – Goebbels would be so proud.
The story starts about six years before the Battle of Yavin (BBY). For filthy casuals like me, BBY is the climax of A New Hope – now the standard dating system. We then follow Thane and Ciena’s careers as their lives interweave through the events of the original trilogy (OT).
The whole story is built on solid ground for OT fans. It’s within my comfort and knowledge zone, and I can’t deny that I got many little moments of satisfaction when something recognisable happened from the OT timeline. All the nostalgic buttons are being pushed, repeatedly.
Before I continue, it’s been nearly 50 years since A New Hope but, if you still haven’t seen it, be warned there are movie and book spoilers coming up. Also, what the hell is wrong with you? Go and watch A New Hope immediately.
Nostalgia fatigue
Lost Stars’ appeal going into the story was getting to see the big OT scenes and characters from alternative perspectives. At first, the familiarity was enjoyable, but the coincidences of these characters finding themselves in these exact places (there are 3.2 billion inhabited planets in the Star Wars galaxy, apparently) got very tedious, very quickly.
Actually , it got exhausting. Oh, you bumped into Grand Moff Tarkin backstage, did you? That’s fine. You were on the Death Star at Alderaan, were you? OK. You were Darth Vader’s Uber driver after the Battle of Yavin? Wow. We’re going to Hoth now, are we? I see… And now it’s Endor time?
I genuinely laughed out loud when one of the characters found themselves chilling at Bespin for absolutely no plot progression whatsoever. She was just keeping the engine running on the Star Destroyer, presumably, while Vader fought with Luke. The chapter closes with Vader asking his crew if they had disabled the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive. The crew say yes. The Millennium Falcon then immediately jumps into hyperspace. A nonchalant Darth Vader then just walks away. End of chapter. What, why?
No, Lost Stars doesn’t just offer a nod to the original story here and there, it shoehorns characters into every major scene available at the expense of all subtlety. If the writing, delivery and payoffs were better, I’d be less bothered, but every event felt underwhelming and under-explored.
Which brings me to my next point.
A shallow screenplay for kids
Lost Stars itself feels like it was written as a screenplay. Events feel like they’re happening on a Hollywood set, exposition reads like action lines from a script, characters are almost caricatures of themselves and scenes feel formulated to make a point and swiftly move on. The style baffled me initially, until I looked up Gray online. Gray – AKA Amy Vincent – is a professional cinematographer – ah. This explains a lot.
Lost Stars shouldn’t read like a film – it’s a book with a golden opportunity to pull back the curtain and look behind the scenes at some of the big OT moments in more depth. Please, give me all the extra lore and detail that didn’t make it into the initial six hours of film. This is why books are so enjoyable, and why film adaptations can never truly emulate the book. But depth in the big moments is shallow.
Take the scene where the Death Star destroys Alderaan (oh, spoiler by the way). Obviously our characters were around at this point, conveniently out of harm’s way. The whole event is probably a few paragraphs long. WHAT?! The Empire has just committed planetary genocide, you’ve written the main characters right in the middle of it, and all it gets is a fleeting reference? What an absolute miss. Just Nash’s (Alderaanian) experience through that moment could have been a chapter by itself.
Then there’s the ‘kids’ bit. Gray writes for a younger audience, it’s as simple as that. The language is simplified and characters’ thoughts and feelings are spelled out for you – absolutely no thinking or empathy is required on the reader’s part. Events are also brief – they need to sustain the TikTok generation’s attention, after all. Neither of these points should be a negative – I’m clearly just too old and grumpy.
And yet…
Park the heavy coincidences, the simplistic writing, the shallow depth and the repetitive internal monologues and there’s actually a really good story here. I’d be lying if I said Lost Stars never drew me in. I promised myself not to feel bad about leaving a book I wasn’t enjoying unfinished – life’s too short – and there I was, reading right to the end.
There are some compelling character arcs, rewarding surprises, and – without spoilers – a few moments of genuine spine-tingling magic. Following how characters cope with conflicting loyalties and change as they learn about themselves through their experiences was wholly believable and relatable.
Some of my favourite moments were actually reading about the boring shit happening behind the front lines. The politics, the bureaucracy, the corporate dick-swinging and the inter-organisational one-upmanship that infects any large organisation in the real world – it’s all golden.
I was nodding in total recognition, for example, every time a lower ranking officer got promoted into the power vacuum following a senior officer being killed (or Vader getting too enthusiastic with his force chokes). Eventually you’ve got a leadership team made up of soft millennials. Having worked for a big corporate, I can confirm that shit really happens. The power vacuum, not the force chokes.
Verdict
Lost Stars felt like a screenplay written with a brief from Disney – get kids excited about Star Wars again before the latest film drops. It reads like a string of extraordinary coincidences, one after the other, with very little depth or emotional investment.
There are plentiful nods to the original series for film fans like me, but what’s sadly missing for me is the Rogue One effect. Rogue One did two things: it presented a compelling story in its own right, and it made me enjoy the original films even more! Every time I watch the opening sequence to A New Hope, I feel like I’m coming off the back of what Rogue One established. I would even watch Rogue One as episode 0.5. Everything the Rebellion does in the original trilogy now means so much more, because I’ve seen some of the sacrifices they made to get to that point.
I had the same hope for Lost Stars and it didn’t deliver anywhere near what I’d hoped. The OT films are a backdrop for the characters, and the characters all too often feel like passengers in somebody else’s story.
Did it offer enough to draw me in to the wider Star Wars book universe? Had it arrived 20 years earlier, my 16-year-old self may have said yes, but if this is meant to be the pinnacle of the books, I’m afraid 36-year-old me is writing Lost Stars off as a lost cause.
Lessons learned
Lost Stars taught me two things.
Firstly, never go by internet hype alone. You can’t take a book recommendation from people you don’t know or trust, and a star rating is not a replacement for that.
Secondly, I’m not a Star Wars fan. I’m just a fan of good storytelling; sometimes those stories are set long ago in a galaxy far, far away.
