Reviews Books The JC Lit Reviews Special: EMPIRE AND REBELLION: HONOR AMONG THIEVES (spoilers)

The Empire and Rebellion series continues with the adventures of everybody's favorite smuggler, Han Solo! Apparently there's some kind of issue with thieves, and possibly honor.

Some rules: rate Honor Among Thieves on a scale of 1 to 10, supplementing your rating with a review, if you want to (It's not necessary but is highly encouraged). However, please do not rate or review the book until after you've read the whole thing. Thanks.

Go for it.

 

8 and a half out of 10.

It is the first new Star Wars novel I've read since Fate of the Jedi Ascension (each time I try to pick up and read Apocalypse I suddenly find something better to do and don't get me started on trying to read Crucible). It was nice to see the heroes back in the days of the movies timeline, younger and less troubled by children and backstabbing allies (cough cough - Fey'lya, Daala list after list). I loved the new characters like Sian Tesar and the crew of the Aegis. I hope they both get seen again later down the line (I'm adding Sian to list of pilots to fly off Hoth and perhaps fly at Endor and Bakura while the Aegis joins the fleet at Endor).

It'd be nice if we got a good description of what the Aegis looked like and described in some detail.

No complaints and definately the best book to be released under the Star Wars title since Allegiance and Choices of One.

 

I loved this book.

The Corey collective does fantastic worldbuilding, really bringing the settings to life in a way that recent works too often don't. It's a key pulp-adventure characteristic, and it's good to see it in use here. Very simply and effectively, they give you a sense of place, an atmosphere, and bring the location to life. It's especially effective in the first main setting, a sterile, tightly-controlled Imperial Core World. One of the best new settings in a long time. And that simplicity and effectiveness aren't restricted to the worldbuilding; it's a very short book, but it feels dense. They're able to pack in a lot very efficiently; it calls to mind Zahn's ability, best displayed in his first five books, of packing a ton of incident and galaxy-hopping into his pagecount, and making every scene feel rich and fully fleshed-out despite his pagecount; it's just denser writing.

The characterization is great, with Han really coming to life. They do a great job of capturing Han's voice, especially from ANH, when too often other authors' Han is just a riff on TESB. I heard Harrison Ford saying the lines, which almost never happens. Han's dialogue is good, but his thoughts, his characterization, are also perfectly on point. Chewie gets a good showing, too, receiving more attention than usual without a lot of fanfare being paid to it. I'd have liked to have seen more focus, but it's far better than usual. Leia also gets explored, and her characterization is spot-on, too, and it has depth. They get at some ideas about the characters rather than just running them through the paces of a plot. One of the best ways they do that with Han is to turn the plot into basically a giant machine to annoy Han. Han is constantly exasperated as the universe just refuses to cooperate, and it's a great mode for him. Scarlet Hark is a great part of this. Her name is perfectly ridiculous, but otherwise the character is great, a meticulous planner who's just talented enough to lord it over Han, stubborn enough to keep dragging him into trouble, but also kind of naive, someone who thinks having a great plan is a guarantee of success, when veteran improviser Han realizes that every plan is eventually going to go wrong -- something Hark just can't seem to get through her head. It makes her a great foil, as she and Han complement each other in the way guaranteed to be most aggravating to Han. Han's also dogged by an old friend who's turned bounty hunter and just won't give up, providing a nice contrast to Han and a good source of tension. And Hunter Maas is just hilarious.

The plot isn't anything really new, but it's great fun, it works well, and it sends Han across the galaxy, building to stakes with a threat that's at least interesting. There are some really great action setpieces, and it's an incredibly fun, pulpy read that feels like a real throwback adventure. I think it doesn't stay quite as good as it starts due to that first setting being the most fun, but it's quality all the way through and I would really love to see more from Corey.

8.9/10

 

This book started off ho-hum for me but increasingly won me over as I kept on. I came to really enjoy it. It was the best sort of character study of Solo I've read. I liked the tight focus and how all the characters and events were basically filtered through Solo's point of view. Well done in general. I've been pleasantly surprised by both Empire and Rebellion books.

8/10

 

Very good book. I did like the tight focus on the main character, but i still would have liked more from Luke's perspective. still very good novel compared to the last one

8/10

 

Desperately waiting for a Kindle release here.

Only two weeks to go...

 

9 of 10 from me basically for what Havac and Jello already said

 

Average score: 41.9/5 = 8.38

 

Most of the good points have been covered, but might as well add a review before March ends.

I wasn't expecting much, not after not hearing much about the first Rebellion book (not awful, but not great either) and from a new author at that, but I had a long flight ahead of me so I picked up a Kindle version and huh, it turned out very good. I was expecting a fringe centered book, but instead it basically almost turned into an Indiana Jones adventure, given who plays Han, surprised this kind of thing doesn't come up more often.

Great characterization from Han in this book- its not just the same old complaining about being stuck in the Rebellion, at least not most of the time, and he shows he has seen a lot (such as when they were trekking through that jungle). Also love how at the end he knows that system is too dangerous for anyone to ever control. Leia as a Rebellion leader also gets a lot of nice screen time, negotiating but also switching to frontline fighter easily. Luke didn't get much to do, but I prefer off-screen awesomeness (their distraction turns out to be a lot more destructive than distracting) to bad writing, so I don't mind Luke not showing up much, this is Han book. Even the new characters like Scarlet and Baasen turned out pretty good. I was expecting Baasen to backstab Han at any moment, he was actually pretty honest about that, but he turned out sort of ok.

Though the Noghri thing was odd (yeah, out of the hundred of species, how do they come up with that?), and huh, these K'kybak seem like they were one of the most advanced short of the Celestials.

So a 9/10 from me. If/when new Star Wars books are announced, I hope these two write more, they've shown a pretty good grasp of the characters and the Star Wars universe in general.

 

Average score: 50.9/6 = 8.48

 

Hmm, didn't find this to be as good everyone else.

There's nothing particularly bad about the book, it just doesn't really come to life for me. Perhaps the best way to put it is this was a book where I could, in a rare fashion, feel character shields and a lack of there being anything at stake. I did like the superweapon concept - that was an innovative take, along with the Core and the Empire's chilling vision of a perfect world. Scarlet Hark, Baasan, Hunter and the others were OK but nothing really jumped out to make me particularly care about any of them.

The book did have some effective set-pieces, the bombardment of Kiamurr, the X-wings slagging a stormtrooper emplacement with walkers, but having a Star Destroyer explode off-page is a criminal waste.

To be fair, the book is likely paying for sins beyond its authors ability to control - the cover is weird and off-kilter, it's just not.... right. It's insultingly slim for a hardback and the pages internally feel thinner too. If this is representative of the production values for future books, count me out. At the same time, if the story is representative of the future EU then again, I'm not interested as it's too neat, tidy and safe. So, this is likely my last EU book.

6/10

 

Forgot to include that - but yeah, way out of character.

 

Average score: 65.9/8 = 8.24

I think you'll understand my luxuriating in the irony.

 

In Shadows of the Empire, there's this line regarding Leia:

She would not cry.
She would get even.

And a case could be made that Leia does show a somewhat vengeful streak toward the Empire in the OT-era comics, up to a point.

 

Not just there, Splinter of the Mind's Eye is also very open about her hatred of the Empire.

 

If you have to explain your gag, chances are it was bad in the first place!

Of course, I might have an inkling of what you so cryptically allude to. It's funny how people draw all kinds of damn fool sweeping conclusions from simple dislike of a single story!

 

Went into it expecting little, and got less than that. To be honest I was generally on board with the whole thing until the last quarter. Up to that point it was competent if unspectacular. It fell apart when they landed on the super weapon planet.

8 X-wings destroying a Star Destroyer? Stupid

Having it be entirely off page? Even worse

Spend all book looking for a super weapon and decide to immediately destroy it because hey the Rebels might use it to be tyrants one day? Look, I quite liked the whole Han sees all governments as evil thing. I felt it was a fitting and competently executed characterisation. However, the payoff with the destruction of the (woefully inadequately explained) super weapon was pants. That scene where Han has a political discussion with Leia while they're pinned down behind the console was terrible. As I said it's an interesting element to the Han character that builds well at the start of the book, but the payoff (being the out of place discussion while under heavy fire and the speed with which they were all on board with getting rid of the tool that could win them the war) was woeful.

Really really obvious character deaths? We've got those too! Baasen and Sunnim might as well as have been wearing red shirts.


The further annoying me is that like a lot of other recent EU stuff from this era everything is so isolated from other works - new planets that we'll never see again, new characters that we'll never see again, new technologies that we'll never see again. Give me James Luceno and his excessive EU references and nods any day over this.

4/10

 

Average score: 69.9/9 = 7.77

 

This latest book gives me hope for the Empire and Rebellion series' future. Corey is an excellent author (rather authors with an 's' - it's a pen name for a combined effort of two authors). The book is engaging, the storyline fun, the action fast-paced and exciting, the familiar characters written well and the new characters are quite enjoyable. I wrote a review of the book for my website here: http://www.g-pop.net/swhonorthieves.htm
but the long and short of it is that Honor Among Thieves is one of the best Expanded Universe books I've read in a while.

 

Umm. You do know the series is dead, right?

 

Yeah, that's what I hear, but maybe the powers that be will reconsider. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

 

EAR is a Legends series--we won't want it to continue.

So yeah, finally finished it over the weekend and I really liked it. It was the fastest SW read for me since Kenobi, which for me says everything about whether I'm into the story or not. The only thing that really stuck out to me in a bad way was 8 X-wings taking out an ISD (and not even that it happened as much as everyone treating it like not even that unusual). Even Jello's Noghri wasn't a big deal to me because it's possible to interpret the species name as coming from the omniscient narrator and not necessarily Han's personal knowledge.

I felt bad for Chewie being in constant "watch the ship" mode, but all the other characters were great. I could quibble with a lot of things in the conclusion but by that point the book had settled into a classic Goodwin/Williamson/Daley sort of vibe and I could forgive all the tropes and illogic because they were at least skillfully handled and engaging. Kiamurr in particular was the kind of early-Rebellion-politicking stuff we've barely seen despite all the material in this time period (and would've liked to see more of in RE).

All in all, this felt like the closest we've ever come to a fourth Daley book carrying Han's story past ANH. 8.5/10