About a month ago, Lucasfilm Publishing and Disney Books released Star Wars: The High Republic – Tears of the Nameless by author George Mann, the latest young-adult novel in this ambitious multi-platform storytelling initiative. Having just now finally caught up on reading the book, below are my mostly spoiler-free thoughts on this installment.
Despite being a late addition to the writing roster of The High Republic, George Mann (who previously gave us the short-story anthologies Star Wars: Myths & Fables and Star Wars: Dark Legends) has established himself among the MVPs of this years-long project set centuries prior to the familiar events of the Star Wars movies. And in The High Republic – Tears of the Nameless, Mann provides us with an incredibly entertaining and well-constructed companion piece to the middle-grade entry Beware the Nameless (written by Zoraida Córdova) and the currently running Dark Horse Comics miniseries The High Republic Adventures – Echoes of Fear (penned by Mann himself). This novel is the story of the recently minted Jedi Knight Reath Silas– who has featured in numerous The High Republic stories before– and Padawan Amadeo Azzazzo (new to Phase III of the initiative), both of whom have a vested interest in solving the problem of the deadly, Force-eating Nameless creatures and the mysterious, planet-consuming Blight that has accompanied their arrival into the known galaxy.
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After a mission in which he and his Jedi Master Mirro Lox have a run in with the aforementioned fearsome creatures– also called Levelers– Amadeo finds himself teaming up with Reath in the laboratory of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, conducting research into a connection between these two menacing phenomena, both of which are being utilized by the dangerous band of marauders known as the Nihil and their leader Marchion Ro as weapons against the Jedi and the Republic. But this book also spends time with the ragtag crew of the Vessel (namely Affie Hollow, Leox Gyasi, and Geode) as they transport Jedi across the galaxy on various quests, Jedi Knight Vernestra Rwoh, who is investigating a mystery within the subterranean bowels of the Jedi Temple itself, and Cohmac Vitus, a Jedi who recently left the Order in the wake of the Starlight Beacon disaster but who remains fixated on investigating the origins of the Nameless as well. There’s also Azlin Rell, a “fallen” Jedi who turned to the dark side and lived an unnaturally long life after the events of The High Republic Phase II, and is now being kept under close watch in a Jedi holding cell, though Reath visits him regularly for information about his experiences with the Shrii Ka Rai– another name for the enigmatic Force-eating beasts.
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As I mentioned in my review for Tessa Gratton’s adult-targeted Temptation of the Force over the summer, we’ve reached a point in The High Republic where everything really feels like it’s starting to come together. That’s evident in the way Mann impressively pulls together numerous dangling plot threads via Reath and Amadeo’s research, and then– in the back half of the book– sends them out on two separate (but equally dangerous) planet-hopping assignments, only to have them and their allies reconvene for a thrilling climax set on an eerily abandoned world. As a bigger fan of information, character moments, and dialogue than I am of action when it comes to Star Wars novels, Mann has bowled me over with his skill in writing the former three, though he also excels at the latter. And as someone who has always been enamored with the history and lore of the Star Wars galaxy, these characters’ probes into the background of some of The High Republic’s greatest mysteries had me entranced pretty much all the way through Tears of the Nameless. There are some quite horrifically dark moments here, but there are some terrific motivational lessons to be learned as well, about fear and the strength provided by asking for a little help from one’s friends. The postscript acknowledgments by the author shed some light on how he arrived at those messages, and I don’t want to disclose those revelations here either, except to say that I hope George Mann continues to be around and writing excellent Star Wars stories for a long time to come.
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Star Wars: The High Republic – Tears of the Nameless is available now wherever books are sold.