Lost Stars: Two sides of the war

“Sometimes we're loyal to more than one thing. When there's a conflict, we have to choose which loyalty to honor.”

When Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 for four billion dollars, fans went wild. They anticipated and feared in equal measure what new content this change would bring—new movies, new TV shows, and new books. Thus, we are brought to Lost Stars: Journey to The Force Awakens by Claudia Gray.

Disney announced its intentions to launch a new trilogy of Star Wars movies with Episode 7: The Force Awakens. With this release came the wave of a new slew of Star Wars books, hinting at the upcoming film. This promise of information may have been the initial appeal of Lost Stars, but the 2015 book is so much more than that.

Lost Stars focuses on two children, Ciena Ree and Thane Kyrell, living on a planet freed by the Empire in the aftermath of the Clone Wars. They both seek to help the galaxy, but as they grow, they both come to learn that they have very different ideas about how to bring about peace.

Full of dozens of movie references for fans to pick up on, Lost Stars takes place across the timeline of the original Star Wars trilogy and features many familiar characters and well-known scenes. Being able to know the course of the set story is strangely tragic, in a way, as you cannot help but read on, though you already suspect how things will end. But it is with this dual-perspective narrative, following the movies from two new angles, that makes Lost Stars a more than worthy addition to the greater Star Wars universe. It may have been originally released seven years ago, but Lost Stars still holds up as not only a captivating read but one of the first forays into the modern world of Star Wars novels.