Reviews Books The JC Lit Reviews Special: CATACLYSM (Spoilers)

Cross posting my review from the non-spoiler thread.


Star Wars: The High Republic: Cataclysm by Lydia Kang is the second adult novel in phase two of the High Republic and her first Foray into full-length Star Wars literature. Concerning High Republic books, the weakest has been her predecessor Zoraida Córdova's Convergence. Whether Lydia Kang will be able to capture lightning in a bottle that was Phase One is a complex question for many readers, but for me? It's a little column A, a little of column B. Spoilers Follow For Entire Book:


The Good:


Firstly, I want to point out how well Kang writes. Her prose is very workmanlike and has an excellent rhythm to it. She knows exactly when to switch point-of-view, and how much that contributes to the feel of a good Star Wars novel. However, the biggest strength she brings to the table is her dialogue, it's snappy with no growing pains with the characters' voices that you sometimes get with a new author taking over. Her pacing is also great, I was glued to my book as soon as it arrived finding it quite hard to put down.


Orin Darhga:


If you were to ask me my favorite character, I would easily choose Orin Darhga in a heartbeat. Introduced in this novel, his jovial Jedi Master personality is incredibly endearing. I also enjoy his chemistry with Gella. I love how he is kind of a no-bull**** straight talker who tells it as he sees it but does it in the kindest way possible. However, it is a little frustrating that he dies in a very absurd way in this novel. I also listened to segments from the audiobook while waiting for my book to be delivered, and Mark Thompson gave him the thickest textbook Scottish accent imaginable, which I approve of, and it incepted the idea so when I read his lines, he was sounding like the Scotsman from Samurai Jack.


Yaddle:


One thing is very clear when reading Cataclysm, Lyida Kang loves writing Yaddle. I mean it's hardly a secret when the quote on the back of the dust jacket is a Yaddle quote.

Yaddle is not one of the oldest Glup ****tos in Star Wars history, but she has been seeing a revival of interest as of late in The High Republic and after her lackluster episode in Dave Filoni's Tales of the Jedi animated anthology. Ever since her cursed-looking puppet made its first appearance in The Phantom Menace the Star Wars Expanded Universe has always wondered "What's the Deal with female Yoda?" Legends gave her quite a bit of a spotlight in the early Republic comics, and in the scholastic Watsonverse Jedi Quest series, but she has been somewhat missing in New Canon until recently. Overall, I was surprised by how much I liked Yaddle in Cataclysm. Kang writes her so well, giving her moments of excellent wisdom as well as some of the best comedic scenes that this book has to offer. I found pairing her with the Arkanian Jedi youngling Cippa Tarko to be quite wholesome. One scene that will always stick with me is this exchange that I imagine all people who have interacted with young kids can relate to.

A final word on Yaddle is this. Yaddle > Yoda.


Xiri/Phan-tu:


Their noble romance was one of the parts of Convergence that really captivated me, and I enjoyed seeing it in Cataclysm as well. You would think that the story of star-crossed lovers being from two planets at war would borrow heavily from tropes seen in Romeo and Juliet and or the Trojan War, but I think the thing that makes Xiri and Phan-tu work so well for me is how it's not that. They are often the most competent and levelheaded in the room. I said in my convergence review that I was looking forward to the resolution on whether their relationship would make it, and I am happy to report that it seems like it will. Of course, they make mistakes in this book, and their relationship at the beginning was seeming pretty rocky, but nothing like the Night of Sorrow on Dalna to give your marriage a second forged in the fire moment.


Amazing Build-Up:


I found that I enjoyed the front half of this novel a whole lot more than the "Everything had converged into a cataclysm of violence" (actual line in the book) half of the novel was less interesting. I have seen some reviews compare it to a Sanderlanche, but I haven't read any of his work so I can't comment on if that is accurate, but I found the Night of Sorrow to be a little underwhelming in execution. For one, I think Dalna was just a little bland setting for this final showdown. However, the intrigue of getting all of our parties to Dalna was part of the book I enjoyed the most.


The Bad:


Unfortunately, this duology of High Republic Adult books has been very much a mixed bag. There is stuff I like, but I don't know if I would recommend them as must-reads for people wanting more insight on Phase One as it stands. Phase Two still has a plethora of comics and one more YA novel yet to release, so maybe that last jig-saw puzzle piece will snap into an aha moment for me, but that is yet to be determined


Axel Greylark:


I really hate Axel Greylark. Honestly, there is very little that I find interesting about him, and since his "arc" is so integral to this duology of books, it seems like my enjoyment of it was doomed from the start. I know a lot of other people really can't get enough of Axel, but to me, he is just a narcissistic nepo baby who manipulates every person he meets and fails upwards in life with mommy issues. He tanked all my enjoyment of Gella in the first book and killed my favorite character in this book with his actions, and I was actively rooting for Gella to put a lightsaber through him in the final act, even though it wasn't very Jedi-like. He does "redeem" himself in this book, but frees Gella from the Path during the final part of this book, but I overall just am glad that Axel is in the rearview window for The High Republic. Axel walks the tightrope between a character you love to hate and you feel sorry for so well, that he doesn't fall on either side and it's just frustrating for me. His motivations are fairly vapid, and his arc ends in this book where we picked up at the beginning with him going back to jail, only with mommy issues slightly resolved.


The Mother:


In the few scenes that the Mother is in this book, she is great, but there aren't many. One of my biggest critiques of Convergence was the villain department, and Cataclysm improves with the point-of-view character Binnot Ullo being very well written, but Binnot feels like the villain before the villain if that makes sense. It is cool seeing the beginning of the Path schism that is going to take place with the path of the closed first forming in this book that I imagine will spin off and become either the Nihil or the Elders of the Path that we see in The High Republic Adventure comics. The Mother is going to need quite a bit of fleshing out to get to a point where I like her as a villain, and with only one book left, Cavan Scott has a lot of legwork to do in the comics and in Path of Vengeance. The writing on the wall is her beef is related to having to give up a daughter to the Jedi, hence the Mother title, and I'm not thrilled about that plot development and am hoping my theories are subverted.


Yoda:


One of the nuclear hot takes in Star Wars that I have, is my dislike for Yoda. Yoda is a decent Jedi, but by the Force is a terrible leader of Jedi. He is pretty much hands-off this entire phase it seems, just having a few scenes with Kyong Greylark, and then getting off his ass and finally going to Dalna at the very end, but the coup de grâce to Yoda in this book is him knowing about the Nameless and doing NOTHING about it. The final conversation that he has with Creighton Sun is so infuriating. It seems that the more we get of Yoda in canon, the more incompetent he appears to be. Once Phase One wrapped up, and I learned about the jump backward for Phase Two I was peddling the story that we would learn about the Jedi doing a no-no of some kind. I mean I was right, there is no bigger no-no than discovering an existential threat to the entire Jedi Order and therefore the Republic and covering it up and kicking the can down the road for a century and a half. Yoda is straight-up acting like a fossil fuel executive man. I can't tell if this is intended, like is The High Republic team intending to do this, or is just like a tuning fork for me as a Yoda hater. I will reiterate my point Yaddle > Yoda.


Lackluster Payoff:


Piggybacking off of my point about how good the build-up is in this novel, I was let down by how it all resolves. Once all roads pointed to Dalna it did feel like we were getting some Rising Storm-esque fluster clucks that all of our cast was walking into and that those who read Mission to Disaster knew would be the event known in Phase One as the Night of Sorrow. It was fine, but I do think that Kang bit off more than she could deliver, the action scenes became a bit bland and muddled, and hard to parse out. The falling action had that terrible Yoda scene, and it was cool that E'ronoh & Eiram worked together to help at Dalna, but I felt like the crossover between the YA novels and the Adult novels were a detriment to each other's stories. I am fine with the Mother being the puppet master, but I think E'ronoh & Eiram's conflict should have been the plot of this duology of books first and foremost, and the Dalna and plot surrounding that should have been the YA novels.


The Problem With Prequels:


Piggybacking off of the piggyback, I feel like this is why so many High Republic readers were left scratching their heads when we learned Phase Two was set in the past. It would be like if after making Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas made The Phantom Menace making the movie Machette viewing order the release order. Like don't get me wrong I like the Phantom Menace, but after the Darth Vader reveal it would be a little confusing in my opinion. It's not an impossible task, but if I were in charge of it, I would scale back the scope of this phase and make it a much more personal story between a small cast. I think that is why Path of Deceit works so well, and why the two adult novels don't. Path of Deceit has like seven or eight important named characters and I enjoyed the story. The Path of Open Hand is interesting, but I think it would be more interesting if it was smaller in scale instead of Nihil with a little pinch of Jonestown. I think focusing entirely on how the Path can turn into the Nihil was the direction instead of the Path being just the Nihil without the punk aesthetic and an anti-Force-using bumper sticker. We know the ending, we are just looking for details to inform the future, which is fun for some, but kind of boring for others. Yoda in Midnight Horizon has a line talking about looking toward the past to inform their choices in the present or something like that, and that is great in principle, but as it stands the Phase Two adult book duology doesn't really do that. It covers E'ronoh & Eiram, which we know will end as foretold in Into the Dark. It covers the Path turning into the militant Nihil from a certain point of view, but it's kind of half of the picture. The problem with prequels is that you need a good how. How does Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? All of the Hows in these books aren't really groundbreaking, and informing my thoughts on Phase Three which I feel is the opposite of its intended purpose.


General High Republic Issues:


Piggybacking off of the piggyback off of the piggyback this is just an issue that a lot of people have been having with the High Republic. Its biggest strength, being a story told across many mediums, is also showing its ugly head with some weaknesses. I have read everything The High Republic has released, I am a Star Wars content whale, and I am being catered to. However, my brother has only read the three adult novels from Phase One, and enjoyed them, has gaps in his knowledge that are never going to be filled, making the story kind of an all-or-nothing thing that does have its shortcomings. It's good for us whales that are going to read everything and see if it all connects, but for average fans trying to break in it's impossible. It's getting into Star Trek Expanded Universe territory that we are going to need color-coded flowcharts for plotlines and where they get resolution because it isn't a traditional A to B story.


TL;DR:


Overall, Star Wars: The High Republic: Cataclysm earns a good ranking from me 7.5 out of 10, Lydia Kang did an excellent job writing the story, but there are some plot elements I don't enjoy and a slew of inherited problems that the entire second phase of the High Republic has had. A lot of Phase Two's success for me is depending on Path of Vengeance to tie things up in a meaningful way.

 

I think this is my favorite high republic book. It felt like good payoff for what has already happened in the last two. Having master Creiton Sun almost die actually give me some shivers. Although I think it would have been better if they established that Aida Forte had died in that scene. Would have added more weight. In the end it makes it feel like it was a last minute decision to kill her.

while the book takes itself seriously there are some good jokes, but ironically the comic relief character is literally killed off when they decide it’s time to get really serious.

overall I give this a 9.1 out of ten

 

I was really disappointed with this novel, and feel like it fell apart into a bit of a mess in the final third. Kang's writing of action set pieces is incredibly poor, and her prose at times became so clumsy she almost guiltily had her own characters declare that lines of dialogue didn't make sense (think that happened on at least three separate occasions). The final third of the book became so convoluted and it wasn't helped by having three different pairings of senior male Jedi with deputy female Jedi running around in the same place. Perhaps I was hurt by having read Path of Vengeance first, which handled the climactic battle (IMO) much better, but my suspension of disbelief was stretched to the limit that the plots of both books were largely happening 'off-screen' of one another.

A broader criticism of THR which fed into my issues with this book is the obsession with connective tissue and each book being a puzzle piece in a larger story, and not a coherent story in and of itself. A critical example of that in this book was the Mother just vanishing in the final third and her resolution not even being addressed, meaning if you hadn't read PoV you had no idea what happened to her. It would be like Palpatine just disappearing in RotJ and finding out in ancillary material that an Ewok had killed him. There's fleshing out and supporting a story through different mediums, and then there's harming your product by not at least giving a coherent and comprehensive story within a book. A book needs to still stand on its own as an independent story, and the plot of this specific book waxed and waned as it seemed to deliberately swerve story elements so that they could appear elsewhere. Marda Ro gets a single off-hand mention in this book, as if it was scared to use her name because she's 'in other material' when she should have at the very least had an appearance and had her confrontation with the Mother detailed.

The sheer number of Jedi on Dalna who were almost going out of their way to not interact with each other to not tread on the feet of other material was also rather ludicrous, and we had so many instances of Jedi just popping up or disappearing for the sake of it.

As someone else mentioned, and again feeding into my frustrations above, the decision not to mention the Leveller in the Archives is literally done to solve a plot hole of this book's own making - i.e. well the Jedi of Phase One don't know about the Leveller so how can we justify that if they've encountered it here? Both this and PoV had (tenuously) gotten away with having the Jedi encounter the Leveller without actually knowing what it was, but then this book randomly decided to go a step further at the end, only to have to undo or sidestep the discovery, begging the question of why have them discover it in the first place? Just leave it as the mysterious ash-inducing weapon that was being theorised in PoV (with the potential link to the Rods instead of a creature), so that 200 years later Yoda can again theorise that the Rods have been uncovered or something of the sort. The book created issues for itself to then solve that were so needless.

Greylark's characterisation, along with plenty of other characters, was so inconsistent through the book, and it really did come across as not really understanding how to define and create distinct, deep characters. So many characters seemed to be charicatures of themselves at times, with the language used to describe their actions really facile and thin. It's hard to explain quite what I mean, but the descriptive language in this book just felt like it was written by a 12 year old who imagined this is how people act and talk without actually understanding how real people emote.

What disappointed me so much was I actually really enjoyed the first half or so of this book, and thought the plot had been built up reasonably well, but then we fell back into the same trope of this era of books of 'singular event we'll show you from enough different points of view to pad out the majority of this novel without any plot development'.

3/10