The following review contains spoilers for Star Wars: Bloodline!
With a new brain trust over at LucasFilm, the Star Wars universe is more cohesive than ever. Before the sale, movies, novels and comics all coexisted in an uneasy alliance; never hostile toward each other outright, but never quite on the same page, either.
Now, with a new movie series kicking off and a renewed interest in the brand, the studio is making sure all things Star Wars line up and tell one consistent story. This is especially true for the franchise’s book series, which are now more important than ever. These books fill in the gaps left between movie trilogies and let readers know even more about that galaxy far, far away.
The latest book to come from LucasFilm and Disney is Star Wars: Bloodline, a title that focuses on the struggles of Senator Leia Organa as the New Republic established after Return of the Jedi begins to crumble.
Like pretty much every Star Wars story, there are two opposing sides looking to secure power as civil war looms. On one side there are the Centrists, who believe in a strong centralized government and military to keep order in the galaxy. And on the other side are the Populists, who wish for individual planets and star systems to retain responsibility for their own people.
The thing about Star Wars: Bloodline is that it’s about as subtle as a Rancor roar. It attempts to mirror our own politics so closely that you could easily replace a few of the names with Trump, Clinton and Sanders and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were reading 2016 Election Fan Fiction. It's hard not to roll your eyes at some of the lines author Claudia Gray throws out there, especially when we see the galactic stand-ins for Fox News and MSNBC offering their own slanted takes on the Senate politics.
Because Bloodline is so heavy on the politics, it's pretty much completely devoid of firefights, space battles and Jedi action. So if you’re waiting for a lightsaber to get ignited or a limb to get lopped off, you’ll need to get your fix elsewhere. This is for the type of Star Wars scholar who gets the same thrills from learning the ins and outs of the Galactic Senate that other people do from watching The Battle of Hoth with a six-pack.
Still, despite the slow pace and political plot threads, Leia’s struggle here is a nice departure from her roles in the movies, especially her short-changed part in The Force Awakens. Here she’s much more proactive and graceful as she attempts to bridge the gap between the Centrists and Populists, even though she’s well aware of how impossible it may be.
Gray portrays Leia as a beacon of hope, someone that both sides can find common ground with amid the chaos. She also has an aura of hushed respect around her, as the galaxy has not forgotten her or her brother’s heroics during the Galactic Civil War. That all comes to a crashing halt when Leia’s true parentage is revealed, conjuring up vile memories of the Empire’s reign over the Galaxy. Gray nails the gravity of the situation and makes the Vader bloodline a serious issue that divides the Senate and allows for — ahem — more nefarious forces to move in for the kill.
The fracturing of the political system is where the book ties into The Force Awakens and Episode VIII. With the Skywalker secret out, The New Republic begins to crumble as people realize that it was built by the family of the very evil they just extinguished. This schism hints at the rise of The First Order, shows the formation of the Resistance and builds toward the overall political atmosphere we find ourselves in during The Force Awakens.
Overall, Bloodline serves as a more substantial novel than an entertaining one. It fills in the blanks of the new movies and gives more backstory to the world of The Force Awakens; however, if you’re not interested in the intergalactic minutia of it all, the book might fail to reach the heights of other Star Wars books and comics out there.
