Star Wars: Allegiance [Mass Market Paperback]

As books go, I found Outbound Flight rather on the boring side, not so with Allegiance. This book, I finished in 2 days. The characters are a mite on the flat side, but Mara Jade pulls through fine. Everything ties together neatly in the end...perhaps too neatly but heck, that's most good fiction out there.

The dialogue's decent, the actions great, the plot twists are good. Overall, Zahn pulls off another lovely star wars novel.

BTW, the idea of including non-clone stormtroopers is only logical, this is a long time after the clone wars. Palpy wouldn't be spending credits on more clones when he can just invest in some nice propaganda and get lots of youngin's ready to defend the Empire.

Timothy Zahn returns to the Star Wars universe with his eighth novel set in the galaxy far, far away. This time he has a new era to play around in: Allegiance is set right after the events of A New Hope. It features many familiar film characters as well as a prominent role for a teenage Mara Jade and an intriguing squad of rogue stormtroopers. Perspectives vary among fans of the Expanded Universe as to how fleshed out the three years between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back truly are. If you include the Marvel comic series, the newspaper strips, and various articles in journals and magazines as canon, this period is already quite busy. If you are incorporating novels only, it is considerably thinner. My personal view on canon is I don't spend much time dwelling on it: if it is Star Wars and I am entertained, I'm happy.

In Allegiance, Zahn weaves a very complicated plotline that verges on being a mystery tale. Many new characters are introduced and then discarded quickly as events unfold, making the story a bit choppy. For this reason, it's likely to be a more satisfying read when digested in larger chunks than read piecemeal a chapter or two at a time (which is what I did).

A few new characters do stand out, though, and they are the five Imperial troopers on the run that comprise the Hand of Judgment. Much like Karen Traviss and her beloved clone troopers featured in her Republic Commando novels, Zahn takes a group of helmeted anonymous soldiers and makes them dynamic individuals. Their attempts to reconcile their doubts in the Empire with their need to to serve the galaxy with honor and duty are quite interesting and continue the trend in Star Wars of placing shades of gray into what once seemed like straightforward good vs. evil yarns.

Zahn is indisputably a big fan of his two most famous characters he has created, Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade. Thrawn does not feature in this story, but Mara certainly does. While I very much enjoyed the role she has played in Zahn's books so far, I felt her characterization in this novel stretched credulity. She is a teenager (eighteen, I believe), and yet she possesses the poise, confidence, and skills of someone far older. She is depicted too favorably compared to Darth Vader for my tastes, and I would have liked to have seen a Mara who is making novice mistakes and desperately trying to claw her way up the Imperial ladder into Palpatine's good graces.

What is more disturbing is comparing Mara in Allegiance to Luke. While their ages are similar, they couldn't be portrayed more differently. Luke is stumbling, uncertain of himself, and appears to have regressed to the farm boy we saw at the start of Episode IV, not the newly emboldened warrior at the Yavin ceremony who has just destroyed the Death Star and saved the Rebellion. Han and Leia behave largely as they did toward the end of A New Hope and fare a bit better.

Timothy Zahn is an entertaining writer and I always enjoy his Star Wars stories, but I would classify this one as a more middle-of-the-road effort than his usual. I would be onboard for a sequel featuring the Hand of Judgment more prominently, possibly focusing on what seems the almost inevitable path that will lead them to joining the Rebellion.

As far as Zahn's books go this was not his best. However it was still better than other recently release Star Wars books. The story just wasn't as engaging as I had hoped. While it was interesting to see Mara as "the Hand" she was pretty clueless at times. Ofcourse 18 years of brainwashing by an evil dictator will do that. This book is worth your time to read so I don't want to give to much about the story away,however it would be better to wait for the paperback.I will say that the rogue storm troopers would be interesting to follow in other stories.

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