Aftermath (Star Wars: Aftermath #1) By: Chuck Wendig

Plot:

Journey to The Force Awakens.

The second Death Star is destroyed. The Emperor and his powerful enforcer, Darth Vader, are rumored to be dead. The Galactic Empire is in chaos.

Across the galaxy, some systems celebrate, while in others Imperial factions tighten their grip. Optimism and fear reign side by side.

And while the Rebel Alliance engages the fractured forces of the Empire, a lone Rebel scout uncovers a secret Imperial meeting…

Review:

So I’m a fan of Chuck Wendig’s blog, if he hadn’t written this book I probably still would have read it, but I might not have been as excited for it. I’ve read a couple of his books and I’ve enjoyed them, but they weren’t a genre I read much and they were darker and more depressing than I like. Aftermath was dark but I always had hope, which is what I like about Star Wars. Bad stuff happens, but there’s always hope.

Reading this made me feel like I was in the Star Wars universe, a diverse more realistic Star Wars universe. There were just as many female characters as there were male, which I greatly appreciated. The lingo was spot on for me and I could see the world that was created being right at home in the galaxy, though apparently some superfans had some issues.

I loved Norra, so freakin much. She was a mother but she was an amazing pilot. She made hard decisions, decisions I don’t know if I could make, and she accepted the consequences of them.

It’s actually a tossup who I loved the most, Norra or Jas the female bounty hunter. Honestly I was just happy to see some very capable female characters that were likeable but not perfect. Whenever you complain about the lack of female characters in Star Wars people are like, there’s Leia and Padme. Yeah, two characters with any screen time. Two. The fact that Aftermath had a proportionate number of women to men was refreshing and I would expect nothing less from Wendig.

I ended up purchasing the book after an epic quest across multiple stores because I didn’t want to wait for Amazon to ship the book and me to get it probably beat all to hell. However, I did read some reviews on Amazon and I was amazed at the amount of hate for this book.

Some people hated the fact that it was written in present tense. I can understand not liking it for that reason, it was a style choice by Wendig and I thought that it made the situations more urgent, but it did take me a few chapters to get use too. That didn’t make me hate the book, though.

Other people hated it because it completely wiped out cannon that they had spent years loving and analyzing. Not Wendig’s fault, if you have to hate on someone for that hate on Disney, otherwise get your panties out of knot and get over it.

The real assholes hated it because they felt it was pushing some kind of homosexual agenda. There was a gay character, but the amount of word space used on his sexual preference didn’t fill a paragraph. Temmin had lesbian aunts that were in the book for maybe a chapter, and the fact that they liked to get all up in each other’s vaginas was not talked about. There was also an instance where an orphan mentioned seeing his father’s die in front of him. Those are the only mentions I can remember and they were tiny. I do not see that as pushing an agenda, so if that offended you enough to write a scathing review, I think it says more about you than the book.

I really enjoyed Aftermath and thought it was a great addition to a galaxy I love. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy and I hope Wendig doesn’t kill off any of the characters I now love.

4.5/5