Ok, small confession: although I am a huge fan of all things Star Wars – books, movies, tv shows, comics etc etc etc – I don’t really like Jedi. Hold it! Before you throw rocks at me for this blasphemy, let me explain. Yes, people who can do double back-flips, batting away blaster bolts with a lightsaber all the while moving pieces around a holochess board with their mind, is pretty cool. My problem is, the existential angst going on in the heads of most Jedi gets on my nerves. Light side verses dark side. Always wondering if they are about to tip over the edge because they felt angry. Jedi seem to have a hard time dealing with shades of grey. Which is interesting because one of the things l love about the Star Wars Expanded Universe is that it is ambiguous and grey. Almost no one in the Galaxy Far Far Away is one hundred percent good or one hundred percent bad. You get to see this universe worts and all. Which is why I really like Freed’s Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company.
Twilight Company is a book about a company of Rebel Alliance infantry, a few months after the First Battle of Yavin 4 and the destruction of the Death Star. After that success, the Rebel Alliance advanced from their strong holds on the outer rim of the galaxy through the mid-rim heading towards the Galactic Core and the capital of Coruscant. Along the way there were hundreds of little battles on hundreds of planets. Twilight Company was one of the major participants in these battles. Unfortunately, the Alliances over extended itself and was forced to retreat.The story in the book picks up midway through this retreat when Sargent Namir and his squad capture an Imperial Governor named Everi Chalis. Chalis defects to the Alliance and along with her comes all kinds of useful information and terrible risk for the members of Twilight Company.
This is very much a view of the Rebel Alliance from the bottom up. The reader is taken inside the Corellian Corvette Thunderstrike (Twilight Company’s transport) and sees the day to day lives of soldiers fighting for the Rebels. One of the things I enjoyed most was the many ways in which people joined the rebellion. There are former stormtroopers, criminals, spice addicts and people who joined for the heck of it. Jedi are barely even acknowledged and except for a few mentions and a couple cameo appearances (including one kind of mysterious one) none of the big-name characters appear. If you’ve ever watched The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi and asked yourself “who are those people running around behind Luke Skywalker, Princes Liea and Han Solo?” this is your chance to find out.
