Book Review: Star Wars: Before the Awakening

 

Before the Awakening, written by Greg Rucka and published in 2015 in the lead-up to the release of The Force Awakens, is a collection of three short stories, one for each of the three new characters (Rey, Finn, and Poe) introduced in The Force Awakens. Each story leads directly into the movie, where the characters are first encountered. Finn's story is told first. It basically goes through his training and fleshes out a bit of the background between Finn and Phasma. It sets up a story of Phasma being suspicious of Finn's actions in the lead-up to the Jakku mission, which the troops are heading out for at the end of the story. It creates a continuity error in the movie when Phasma tells Hux that Finn's freeing Poe was his first transgression.

The second story is about Rey, showing her life as a scavenger on Jakku. It hints at but does not directly delve into her force sensitivity and establishes that she is waiting for her parents to return for her. It is set around a story of her repairing a ship that she plans to sell to Unkar Plutt for thousands of portions and generally gives an overall glimpse into what life on the planet is like.

The third story centers on Poe. It tells of how he meets Leia and joins the Resistance. It also shows how the New Republic has essentially ignored the threat posed by the First Order and leads directly to the events of Poe's mission to Jakku to get the map to Luke from Lor San-Tekka. His story also serves as a continuation of the comic series, which was centered around Poe and his parents, who were members of the Rebel Alliance.

The hardcover version of the book is short at a little under 250 pages. Each of the stories reads quickly so if you are a fairly fast reader, you can get through it in a day or so. There are no major giveaways to the questions about Rey's past that (as of when this was originally written) were left open after The Force Awakens and have (potentially) been answered in The Last Jedi or may ultimately be tweaked in Episode 9. Of course, now that all three movies have come out and the book Shadow of the Sith has been released, Rey's backstory has been revealed, but in this book, we just know that she is a scavenger on a desert planet waiting for her parents to return to her. The book does a good job of introducing the new characters and giving them a bit more backstory that could not be done in The Force Awakens. Even though it is a young-reader novel, it is enjoyable enough for adults and is worth the time to read.