David's Review of Tatooine Ghost

4/5 Rancors - I highly recommend Tatooine Ghost. The book has many of our favorite characters, e.g., Han, Leia, C-3PO, and Chewie. The action sequences are outstanding. Han gets in trouble, and Leia helps him. Leia gets in trouble, and Han helps her. Chewie helps everybody as he continues in his usual role of Unbeatable Wookie. 3PO tags along and does what he can to help out. The Millennium Falcon roars into life a couple of times and helps out the entire merry band of adventurers. It’s funny how, after years of seeing the Falcon and its quirks and reading even more about it, one comes to think of the battered freighter as an entity having a life of its own. It is much loved by Han and Chewie, and they seem to know the precise limits of everything on the ship.

That is an excellent group of characters, but there is certainly more. The Imperials are on the scene in force, and some of their troopers are led by a new officer who appears to be an alien and who is much more capable than the normal run-of-the-mill Imperial officer. Reliable insiders tell me that this is our first glimpse of Thrawn. He turns out to be one of the saga’s more memorable characters in other books. We also spent time with Squibs and Askajians during important parts of the tale.

The best part of the book to me was the return of Leia to Tatooine and her efforts to understand the impact of the trip on her soul. She is influenced by several hazy directions from the Force. She gets to meet individuals (Kitster, for example) who had firsthand experience with her father in his early days as Anakin Skywalker, and she is given an electronic journal kept by her grandmother Shmi. As she advances through the journal and talks with people who knew her father, her feelings begin to change. She realizes finally that it might be possible for her to have children with Han and not have them succumb to the temptations of the Dark Side. All of her emotional struggles and soul-searching are extremely interesting.

I only had one real problem with the book and that is with the reason that brings our heroes to Tatooine in the first place. An extremely valuable Alderaanian painting called Killik Twilight is to be auctioned on Tatooine, and it is imperative to the security of Rebel Alliance agents that the painting be recovered before any Imperial forces find that an encrypted Shadowcast containing Rebel Alliance codes is hidden in the painting. I just never got over my feeling of silliness that all of this effort and danger was directed at recovering a painting. However, this is a minor quibble. Mr. Denning tells an excellent tale, and it is extremely interesting to follow Leia as she comes to understand her ancestry.