Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron (2019) Book Review

 Hey everyone, how're you doing today? I'm doing okay. As I promised in yesterday's blog post, I'm back with another book review. This time I'm taking a look at Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron by Alexander Freed. It's a book from 2019, so there won't be very many spoilers in this review as there would be in a review of a Star Wars novel from the '90s, 2000s or early to mid 2010s. So let's get into it.

Alphabet Squadron is very similar to the X-Wing series by Michael A. Stackpole and the late Aaron Allston that Bantam Spectra and Del Rey published between 1996 and 2012. In fact, this book, and it's two sequels are basically the Canon version of the X-Wing series. Right down to the series having a comic book tie-in series. And it's okay. I like it, but it's not great.

One of the things I love about this book is that it shows a more realistic New Republic. In Legends the New Republic, and the Rebel Alliance before it, was always a bit too accepting of Imperial defectors, which is why so many spies infiltrated their ranks. Not to mention the New Republic barely struggled to overtake the Empire, even when Grand Admiral Thrawn and the resurrected Emperor caused massive devastation. In this book it's close to what we ended up seeing in season 3 of The Mandalorian in the Doctor Persching episode. In fact, while I was watching that episode I kept thinking about this book, which is interesting.

The downside of this book is that the focus character, Yrica Quell, is pretting boring. Throughout the entire book I kept finding myself drawn to Hera Syndulla and Caern Adan, Quell's superior officer from New Republic Intelligence. I think that's because not much is known about Quell, aside from the fact that she's a former Imperial TIE Fighter pilot, who supposedly had always planned to defect to the Alliance/New Republic, but never got around to it until after Endor due to Operation Cinder, which was first mentioned in Chuck Windig's Aftermath Trilogy, she's not as interesting as most of the other characters. And of course, with Hera having been a main character on Rebels, which ended a year before this book came out, I was drawn to her because I'll be starting a watchthrough of both The Clone Wars and Rebels in preparation for Ahsoka. The rest of the characters are pretty bland, but this is only the first book in the trilogy, and I have no idea how much they're focused on in the other two books.

Apparently this book was a tie-in to a comic book mini-series published by Marvel, called Star Wars: TIE Fighter. I don't know anything about it, since I've never read it. But I think this is why this book has the problems that it does. According to Wookieepedia, Quell appears in the first issue of the comic book miniseries and so by the time we meet her in the book, you're missing an entire chapter of her story, and the novel doesn't do a great job at conveying that chapter to the reader, since chances are pretty good that not everyone who read this book read the comic book miniseries too. Like I didn't.

Overall, as a standalone novel, or just as the first book in a trilogy, it's a decent enough book. It's just it's not as effective unless you read the prequel comic as well. It's not a fatal flaw though, and I do recommend reading this book. Just be prepared to be a little bit confused if you haven't read the comic as well. 

Alright my friends, that's it for me for today. I'm not sure when I'll be back. We had a death in the family on Sunday and the funeral is on Saturday, so things are gonna be a bit hectic for the next few days. But, I promise I will be back soon. So until then have a great night and I will talk to you all later. Take care.