Just finished STAR WARS: THE HIGH REPUBLIC: TRAIL OF SHADOWS and it left me very… meh. Unfortunately, I feel this way about almost anything Daniel José Older writes for Star Wars. His plots are usually too big and scattershot, he focuses far too much on his own characters and not the overall cast at large, doesn’t write characters that aren’t his creations like themselves, and sometimes his stuff comes across more like fanfic than actual in-continuity stories, IMO.

I’m not even sure what the point of this series was. I thought it was supposed to be about Jedi Emerick Caphtor and private investigator Sian Holt trying to figure out what happened to Loden Greatstorm at the end of THE RISING STORM. There’s a lot of jumping around in the story, connecting the dots on stuff that didn’t actually seem all that important to the story, and then dropping what seemed like a possible love interest into the story that seemed very unnecessary. For a 5 issue limited series, I feel there were far too many subplots and if this had been tightened down to strictly the investigation, and one that did seem to have some solid resolution to it, I think this would have been far better. I don’t think anyone other than hardcore fans of The High Republic will find this as necessary reading; the casual reader can easily skip this series and not miss anything from the larger scope of the story. ( )