Book Review: Star Wars: Mace Windu: The Glass Abyss

 

The Glass Abyss is a 2024 Star Wars canon novel written by Steven Barnes, set shortly after the events of The Phantom Menace, centered around the character of Mace Windu. In it, Windu receives a posthumous message from Qui-Gon Jinn, asking him to help the inhabitants of an Outer Rim planet called Metagos. Windu travels to the planet where its inhabitants live underground because the surface has been turned to glass as a result of a solar flare, to aid the members of a farming clan called the Sa'ad in dealing with the crime lords, led by a being named Chulok. 

The hardcover version of the book is just under 400 pages long. It is a fine ancillary story, but I believe it would have been better suited as a young adult novel, as it is not closely tied to the main Skywalker saga storyline (although Anakin is mentioned a couple of times and Yoda makes an appearance toward the end of the book). For the most part, the adult canon novels have advanced (or fleshed out) the main storyline of the era in which they are set, and the young adult and junior novels tell the side stories (which the story in this book is). That said, Barnes does a good job fleshing out the character of Mace and providing a backstory for the character that was not seen in the films. What knocks it down a couple of stars for me is that this version of Mace does not feel like the same one that was in the movies. It would be one thing if the version of Mace in the book were a much younger version of the character, but I could not envision Samuel L. Jackson's character from the films in this story. It just seemed like Mace Windu was shoehorned into a story that he did not belong in. Ultimately, it is an okay story, but it is not one of the must-read canon novels.