STAR WARS: INTO THE DARK by Claudia Gray

This is the second High Republic novel that I’ve read and it’s the official young adult book in the first wave in Phase 1 of the publishing initiative. It takes place concurrently with the previous adult novel Light of the Jedi but follows a much more focused story about a young Jedi padawan and his companions who get stuck at an abandoned space station following the Great Hyperspace disaster. 

While I enjoyed Light of the Jedi, I was frustrated with the fairly bland characters aside from the villains and how diluted everything was due to the plot casting such a wide net. Those problems are not here, with the plot being much more concentrated and intimate, and characters that jumped off the page. Each character had more nuance than the previous book, especially the Jedi, who seem more like real people with true struggles to go along with their stalwart, noble attributes. 

But I’m still giving it three stars because the action here is nowhere near as cool as I was hoping, the villains were pretty half-baked, and there’s a recurring flashback that seems to be promising major character development and reveals but turns out to be fully unnecessary. 

GRADE: B-