Ash Reviews

  Crimson Reign #1 by Charles Soule is, in a word, mind-blowing. As someone who enjoyed, but still holds onto mixed feelings about Solo: A Star Wars Story , this comic series is amazing to me because I stayed true to loving Qi’ra no matter what my additional feelings were regarding the film. I am always excited to get more Qi’ra content, even if I don’t express it all too often. I’m sad, though, that the date for the second issue has been pushed back. But, that does give me more time to try and convince my partner to start reading Crimson Reign with me, so it is sort of a win-win. This first issue sets the stage for what is bound to be an amazing story that, as we find out in this issue, details the fall of Crimson Dawn. Star Wars has always had a lot of very cool underworld and crime syndicate elements to it that I just love to talk about because of the complexity that they add to the universe. The more Star Wars content we get that features the characters involved with the cr...

I’m going to admit that originally I wasn’t going to write a review for this book. It’s about two years old and probably doesn’t need a review, but after reading it… I have to. My number one concern is with myself and how it took me this long to open up this book finally. Claudia Gray is one of my favourite authors (I adore Leia Princess of Alderaan , Bloodline , and The High Republic: Into the Dark , and I’m also incredibly hyped for The High Republic: The Fallen Star ) and I’ve had this book on my shelf for months now. Coming out of reading it, I cannot give it anything less than five stars, which is something that is frequent for me, especially with specific writers. With Claudia Gray, there is just something about the way that she writes that astounds me every single time I put up a work of hers. Because it was written in 2019, Project Luminous was already underway, and so there are elements from The High Republic that show up here, as well as a lot of bridge with Cavan Scott’s D...

Full disclosure, I watched the episode twice before writing this review. The first viewing I was way too hype afterwards, and I needed a moment to calm down before doing an immediate rewatch and then writing this out. I do believe that while there was less main plotline of the series than I think a lot of people were expecting, it did set a very strong stage for the main series plot, which is very good. I really enjoyed finding out about that gap of about 5 years or so between Return of the Jedi and The Mandalorian where Boba was just in the Sarrlacc pit. I do think that the series opener could have been longer, with maybe a bit more time with Boba and Fennec in the main timeline, but the place where it stopped was a good one. Other than that, I have no real criticisms and give it a 4.5/5. As far as series premiere goes, I did prefer this one to the beginning of The Mandalorian , and Robert Rodriguez did a great job directing this, and I am very much looking forward to more next week...

Jack Mitchell’s The Odyssey of Star Wars is brilliant on a level that I cannot explain. I read it on the recommendation of a friend of mine, and I could not be happier that I did. I rated it five stars, and that is an honest as heck rating that I don’t see changing. One of my favourite things about these ‘retellings’ of Star Wars in the style of the classics is that there is so many themes that come from the classics that we see in Star Wars that prove how strong and important these classics are when examining modern media. I’m going to be honest, if someone tells me that The Odyssey of Star Wars isn’t canon, I will not care. Anything in this book, I will take it as canon because it all makes sense to me in how it flows. The parts where it adds new information, it all makes sense, and it doesn’t really require too much detail. I love that it adds the new information that we’ve gotten since the release of the original trilogy. There are things that allude to the prequels, Rebels , an...

Over this past year, I have become a huge fan of comic books, thanks to Star Wars. Most of that love is thanks to Charles Soule, Cavan Scott, and Daniel Jose Older, and so of course any Star Wars comic with Cavan Scott’s name attached to it is something that I will buy. As a huge fan of The High Republic , I was thrilled when I found out that we were going to get Burryaga and Nib Assek in this comic in addition to our lovely original trilogy favourites, Han Solo and Chewbacca. The art in this story was beyond incredible. We haven’t seen Burryaga and Assek in live action or very many artistic depictions because I don’t recall them being in the main High Republic comics (I might be wrong, I do need to do a full re-read of them), however, the depictions of Chewbacca and Han blew me away. Comic storytelling really does rely on the art to tell half the story, and the art in Life Day really does tell half the story and build the other half of the story. The style worked for both the orig...

Emma Mieko Candon’s Ronin: A Visions Novel deserves all the hype that I have seen, and more. While I rated it 4/5 stars, it is probably closer to 4.5/5 stars. I’m going to start with full honesty: The Duel was not my favourite Visions episode. However, this novel certainly enhanced The Duel for me, allowing me to further connect with the characters and understand the world that they are living in, which is something I found fascinating from the very get go of the episode. Before seeing the episode, my main thought was ‘the helicopter lightsabers in Rebels walked so the parasol lightsaber in The Duel could run’, and I still stand by that, as evidenced by one of the sticky notes that I put in the novel. While I really enjoyed this book, it was heavy for me to get through and took longer than anticipated because I wanted a slow reading and I was incredibly busy around the time that it came out which made the slow reading even slower. I wanted to absorb everything that Candon told us ab...

My initial reaction was incoherent squealing, and absolutely losing my cool over this issue. My goodness, it was a gem, and I cannot wait to read it a third time. I want to give it more stars than five, and since I make the rules, I’m going to do that. I love this issue so very much, everything about it is an absolute delight. My one complaint? Now I have to wait until (according to current release dates) 5 January to get issue 4. I hope it doesn’t get moved back but knowing my luck it will. Thankfully, that is only (currently) two weeks away, and I might be able to manage the wait. However, I know that I will not have recovered from The Fallen Star which comes out the day before. However, I am very much looking forward to the last two issues of Trail of Shadows , even though I won’t know what to do with my life after it’s over. First, I just love the building of the relationships between these characters. Sian and Emerick… I’ve only had them for three issues of one comic miniseries...

Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Ascendancy: Lesser Evil shocked me on every page. I found it difficult to put it down, which was torture because it came out during a very busy week for me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, even though it took me longer than anticipated to read it. I actually finished it on the bus on my way to work because I was not about to leave it alone with 30 pages at the end and suffer through my shift knowing what I would be coming home to. If I was going to suffer it would be because I had already experienced it. This, naturally, led to tears as Taylor Swift played through my Airpods. Yes, the song was exile … and it was probably a little bit too fitting. The foreshadowing in the book, leading up to the final events (like about halfway through the book), did not help me be okay. It was one of those things that made me go “I know what’s going to happen, but you didn’t need to remind me”. Even though I knew what was coming, what was going to happen, in this book, I was transf...

On your Marc(hion)… get set… RO! The Great Jedi Rumble Race was the event of the day in The High Republic Adventures, Issue #11. After all of the traumatic events that have occurred, and knowing that more are abound in Wave 3 of Phase 1 that is incoming January 2022, it was nice to have a more relaxing and fun story set in the era with some of our favourite Jedi (and non-Jedi) just having a grand old time on Starlight Beacon, racing around. Of course, I was very pleasantly surprised to see Stellan Gios, and Trail of Shadows stars, Emerick Caphtor and Sian Holt, on the Beacon. A little hint of where our favourite High Republic investigators will be in Trail of Shadows, Issue #3? Who can say? All I know is that I’m always hyped for more High Republic content. I want to just talk about Farzala, Lula, Zeen, and Qort… deciding to stick together and win the race, coming only second to Buckets of Blood, because who else would be the winner of the Great Jedi Rumble Race? The High Republic ...

The High Republic: Trail of Shadows Issue #1 released on 13 October, and I have read it every single day for about a week. When Issue #2 was moved back by two weeks, I wasn’t sure I would survive it. Nevertheless, I did, and Trail of Shadows Issue #2 was released on the 24 Novemer. I am still blown away by this story and very eagerly waiting for the next installment, due in December. It might just be my favourite comic miniseries ever. Maybe. It begins at Gritzal, one of the key locations of Cavan Scott’s The Rising Storm , and of course Cavan knows what he did. This comic, seeing what Cavan did, rather than just picturing it in my head—it blew me away completely. From the time we saw the preview, I knew that it was going to be spectacular if heartbreaking. I would like to say that Daniel José Older also knows what he did, because he was part of the group that plotted these events and made them happen. The first issue introduced Sian Holt and Emerick Caphtor, two investigators wh...