Solo: A Star Wars Story - Mur Lafferty

After the horrors of The Last Jedi and Last Shot I thought I was done with Star Wars books, yet I found this novelisation waiting on the shelf. Since I enjoyed the film, I thought I might as well end the pilgrimage on Solo, rounding the total number read up to twenty. The back cover boasts that it's the best Star Wars novelisation to date, and whilst certainly more competently written than others, it's nothing particularly special. The book is very faithful to the film, covering every scene accurately whilst adding bonus segments to justify the 'expanded edition' subtitle. It was a mildly enjoyable read, although the extra scenes did not really do a whole lot to flesh things out. The story is a basic adventure heist revealing the origins of the smuggler Han Solo and how he came to escape a life of slavery, team up with his partner Chewbacca, and acquire his famous starship the Millenium Falcon. 

Any complaints I have about the story are best aimed at the film script writers, as Lafferty does an adequate job with the adaptation and none of the plot decisions are his own. In a few places, the quality of the writing dips alarmingly, passages that should really have been picked up by the editor. It looks like Disney have tried to return to the mythic roots of the universe, as seen in the Kessel run sequence directly mirroring Odysseus's perilous navigation between Scylla and Charybdis in Homer's Odyssey. Except here, Scylla is an immense tentacled space beast and the whirlpool is a gravity well consuming everything around it. It was a nice nod to classical mythology in an otherwise uninspired romp through all-too familiar territory. My biggest criticism of the story was the character Enfys Nest, a teenage girl with the ability to hold her own against hardened criminals because... girl power?

Rating: 3/5