One of the better Star Wars EU stories out there. I’d been told for years I needed to read it, going back to when I was first obsessed, somewhere around Episode 3 coming out I believe. It mostly lived up to the hype. I like the way Zahn writes, it is very much my style. A few things he does kind of bug me, but they were small and merely a matter of taste. I did catch a couple of mistakes that were missed in editing, but those are easily forgivable.

The story itself was pretty good. It had a nice pace that kept me reading. There were possibly too many coincidences and characters showing up at the same places at the same time. Pretty convenient. But maybe that’s just the Force at work.

The characters introduced were mostly good and the ones from the movies felt true. I did have a problem with Pallaeon though. He seemed to be there strictly for the purpose of making Thrawn seem like a genius. He does nothing but marvel at Thrawn’s insight and carry out Thrawn’s orders. I understand the need to show us how smart Thrawn is, but I feel like they could have made the character showing us that brilliance a little more necessary to the plot. If we took out his parts, the story would play out exactly the same. And Thrawn himself, while pretty cool, was maybe too smart. There were a couple of times where I thought it was just too much. At least Zahn did give him a couple of failures.

Overall, a pretty good series and a must read for Star Wars fans. I prefer it to much of the new canon, even if there were inconsistencies from it coming out before the prequels were fully planned.