Shadow Fall takes place during the New Republic campaign to capture the Cerberon system, a set of planets orbiting a black hole in the Deep Core. Shadow Fall isn’t an easy read – I had to take my time with it – but it’s worth the investment of time and emotional/mental energy.Īrticle will contain spoilers after this point! If you have not yet finished the novel and do not wish to be spoiled, come back to the rest of the article later! It’s a story about how the traumas of war – both external/military and internal/personal – change people, and what they do when confronted with those traumas. It’s not just a deromanticized version of Star Wars action and a look at the cost of war.
But it is definitely intense, and our characters go through hell – and it’s partly a hell of their own making.
There is precious little laughter in this book – which isn’t to say that it’s all darkness and tragedy. Don’t expect a fun pilot romp interspersed with tragedy the way an Aaron Allston X-Wing novel might make us laugh and cry. If they want to win, they’ll have to do things that they’d scarcely imagined doing in the earlier days of the war. Victory has a price, and this applies to the heroes as much as the villains. What our characters go through – and have to do in order to win – is not pretty. The conflict is narrow and intense, and allows us to focus on our core cast of characters who were introduced in the past novel: the members of Alphabet Squadron, and their antagonists in Shadow Wing. The bulk of the action takes place on the urban world of Troithe, something like Coruscant’s forgotten sibling. Shadow Fall continues the action from the first book in the trilogy, beginning in medias res with a campaign to take a single Deep Core star system from the remnants of the Empire in order to bait Alphabet Squadron’s nemesis, Shadow Wing. Though the Empire falls relatively quickly in comparison to the Expanded Universe’s version of the story, we know from stories like Shattered Empire, Battlefront II, and the Aftermath trilogy that a lot of traumatic things can happen in the year of warfare after Return of the Jedi.
Underscoring that expectation, Del Rey promoted this second book in the Alphabet Squadron trilogy with the phrase “victory has a price”. We expect a gritty, realistic look at war with some hefty emotional pain for the characters (and the readers!). Anyone who’s read an Alexander Freed Star Wars novel has some idea of how Shadow Fall is going to go.
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