After the events of the Republic Fair, and the discovery of the Gravity’s Heart, Lourna Dee is the Republic’s number one target. When things go south for Lourna, she is pushed further than ever – in directions she couldn’t even imagine! Read my review of The High Republic: Tempest Runner now!
Cavan Scott enters the world of audio dramas a second time (his first was Dooku: Jedi Lost), but this time in the High Republic era! Scott is a writing machine in the High Republic era, in this year alone having contributed nine issues to Marvel’s The High Republic series and The Rising Storm, the second of Del Rey’s The High Republic novels, and two short stories in Star Wars Insider. This allows Scott to weave quite a few elements, from events to characters, into this story, highlighting one of the Nihil’s most ferocious fighters: Lourna Dee.
Over the course of the seven books in the era, we’ve seen a lot of the Jedi and some supporting members of the High Republic. But one focus that we haven’t gotten is a look into the troubled psyche of the Nihil themselves. Tempest Runner seeks to rectify that, looking to go deep into the characterization of Lourna Dee. Who is she? Why is she the way that she is? What drives her? These questions are answered by paralleled stories of the present, where she is captured during a failed listening post raid, and the past, where we learn about how she left her home and joined the wider galaxy. The backstory has a lot of nuance to it, not presenting Lourna as completely heroic nor completely villainous. Instead, she is presented as a fairly nuanced character, making big choices, big mistakes, and big personal decisions that affect a lot of people around her.
Before this audio drama, I wasn’t convinced that Lourna’s story was the first one that I needed to hear. I was much more interested in the story of the Drengir, introduced in Into the Dark and expanded in Marvel’s series, or in the backstory of Marchion Ro. Thankfully, this audio drama blew past my expectations and presented a story that was far more enjoyable than I expected it to be. The opening battle, where Lourna’s Tempest raids a listening post, proved to be extremely exciting. I couldn’t turn the audio drama off during this part. I am extremely pleased to report that, personally, every Del Rey release in the era has featured a battle that absolutely gripped me. The pace definitely slowed down, sometimes more than I would’ve liked, as the book went on, but the opening battle was awesome.
That being said, I think Scott did a really good job writing a history that actually tells us about the character. A lot of times, origin stories and histories don’t do much for the character – instead, they feel like they were written solely to put another story on store shelves. That’s not the case here. From the moon of Aareloth to the Nihil, Lourna’s story is all bridged by the theme of “who am I”? This question pushes her to discover more about herself and affects the way that she interacts with people around her. I honestly think you can go back and re-read old stories with her and even see a new dimension to why she is who she is, which is a huge compliment to pay a prequel.
I do love how many characters we’ve heard lately, though. I did a bit of an excited dance every time another character would come in. Thankfully, with the High Republic, cameos are a lot easier to work in. A lot of characters that we know and love can be based on Starlight Beacon, for example, bringing them easily into the range of a lot of stories. Quite a few Jedi made reasonable appearances, giving them a voice for the next time that we meet them in a novel or a comic book. Some sounded exactly like I imagined, and some were interesting takes on the characters. Either way, having the chance to hear them really fleshed them out. For an era without TV or movies (yet), this is a nice treat and a nice way to re-meet the characters we love.
This does lead me to one of my only major critiques about the story itself. The pacing matches more closely with Light of the Jedi than The Rising Storm, where most of the excitement is packed into the front end of the book. The rest of the audio drama is more of the fall-out of the battle, even though it does build to another face-off. This other face-off is expected, building from events in The Rising Storm, but it doesn’t quite become as exciting as the opening battle. Part of this, I think, is that the climax begins with a long exposition of back story and history. And this, I think, contributes the largest part of the reason that the pacing doesn’t work really well: the back-and-forth storytelling.
This back-and-forth storytelling happens in two distinct ways. First, the battle that I laud is actually a flashback, where a Cloud tells a character about the battle. This means that the narrative shifts between the battle and the storyteller without much warning, which is jarring at times. Other times, flashbacks happen in the middle of a conversation. In one chapter, two characters have a conversation interspersed with a ton of flashbacks, and it is hard to tell which is only a flashback and which information is told to the other character. A script would’ve helped here. But it also means that scenes don’t develop as well as they could if they were moving lineally. Like I said, anticipation for the climax builds until characters recount stories to one another in a life-or-death situation.
That being said, I do think that I am cooling on audio dramas as a whole. For one, it is not always easy to follow, even when I am familiar with all of the characters, events, etc. But when it’s Star Wars, it can be really hard to follow when alien names, species, and people are thrown around without me being able to read/hear the names clearly. There’s a scene at the very beginning that was almost completely lost on me due to the way that the voice actors speak coupled with the fact that they are using Star Wars terms. Some voices are fairly similar, too, like Tasia and Lourna (January Lavoy and Jessica Almasy, respectively), sometimes making conversations difficult to follow. (Thankfully, they’re not as hard to follow as the one in Dooku: Jedi Lost where Dooku, Qui-Gon, and Rael Averross have a conversation and it’s truly difficult to differentiate at times!) A script would help here. Twitter users also point out how helpful a script would be for auditory issues.
Besides a slow pacing at times, punctuated by too much back-and-forth, Tempest Runner is a great addition to the era. With the inevitable release of the script book, I look forward to reading this book again and soaking in all of the details I missed. But until January/February, this is a great story to tide us over as we wait for more stories.
You can follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisWerms, and of course, you can follow the Manor on Twitter @MynockManor!
DISCLOSURE: I received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher at no charge in order to provide a review. However, this did not affect the overall review content. All opinions are my own.
Chris’s The High Republic Reviews:
Phase 1, Wave 1 | The Rising Storm | Race to Crashpoint Tower | Out of the Shadows