Star Wars: Phasma by Delilah S. Dawson is darkly fascinating

Force Friday II’s big adult novel release, Star Wars: Phasma, is just as good as its young-adult counterpart, albeit in different ways.

Before we dig into the meat of Star Wars: Phasma, can we just take a minute to appreciate how cool it is that the two major novel releases on Force Friday II were focused on women? The young adult audience got Leia, Princess of Alderaan, and the adults got Phasma. The two books share a basic premise of exposing part of the history of a character that we didn’t previously know about. And, in both cases, the books focus on these two women before the events of the films in which we first meet them.

But Leia is a journey of self-discovery and growth, told from her perspective, and Phasma is … not. As revealed in the synopsis released in August, the idea of this book is that Phasma herself is not telling the story. Vi Moradi, a Resistance spy tasked with discovering her history, is, and she’s telling it to another member of the First Order. As a result, Delilah S. Dawson has to balance a particularly tricky perspective for the storytelling aspects: Vi’s our narrator, but she’s telling a story she heard from someone else.

That intricate layering actually becomes one of Phasma‘s strengths as a novel, because it allows Dawson to do character work on Cardinal and Vi as well just based on the stories that are passed along. Without spoiling much, Phasma is even more of a stone-cold badass than she looks.

Dawson’s also aware of the medium she’s working in. I couldn’t help a small snicker as the book explicitly dropped the phrases “origin story” and “character study” in, both just once, but enough to get the point across. Perhaps it’s a little too explicit, though. We know that that’s what we’re reading without the characters telling us that that’s what we’re reading.

Even within those familiar environs, however, there still manage to be some surprises, and the book didn’t feel too self-aware or self-conscious about what it is. For the sake of the pun, it seems like Dawson’s primary concern was telling a good yarn, and Phasma is certainly that.

Canonically speaking, this book’s events take place before The Force Awakens, meaning there’s room for some of these characters to come back. Frankly, I hope so. Dawson had a fairly tough task putting the book mostly in the hands of characters that we had not met before, even to tell Phasma’s story. However, they do the job very well.

It’s hard not to draw comparisons to this year’s other big Star Wars book about a villain, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn. And Thrawn is good; make no mistake about it. But perhaps because this is the first time we’ve had the chance to really dig into this new character, I found myself more drawn to finish this book quickly.

Basically, Lucasfilm and Disney picked the right two books to anchor Force Friday II, and not just because the two books share the similar concepts we discussed above. I said it with Leia, and I’ll say it again. The future looks bright for Star Wars books. Next month brings From a Certain Point of View, and Canto Bight will be in December just ahead of The Last Jedi, while November’s major release looks to be the start of the Captain Phasma comic from Marvel.

Next: Review: Leia, Princess of Alderaan, by Claudia Gray

But for now, Star Wars readers can definitely content themselves with Phasma and Leia.