Sometimes, it seems like the fate of the Skywalker family and of the galaxy at large are inextricably intertwined. Skywalker: A Family at War details the history of both; read on to see how one family’s important choices changed the pace of the entire galaxy!
Kristen Baver, host of This Week! in Star Wars, and author for the official Star Wars website, set out to write a journalistic book about the fabled Skywalker family. As far as I know, this is one of the first books written from such a unique perspective. Baver herself is a journalist, which gives her writing style a bit of a unique voice among all of the fiction works and even the reference guides that purport to shed light on the larger storylines. This book was released to little fanfare, that I saw, at least, on Twitter, save Baver’s own, but I was delightfully surprised by the book, picking it up on a whim, with little information on it.
Skywalker: A Family at War, a biographical look at the history of the family, is a solid recap of the history of the family line from Shmi to Rey Skywalker. The book is written, according to the flap, as a collection of records, memories, and holo-messages relayed across the history of the Skywalker Saga. (There is no in-universe character collecting these, nor does the book pretend like it comes from the pen/mouth of an in-universe character). Functionally, the book is closer to a non-fiction survey. All nine of the movies are recounted, with some interesting and surprising non-movie stories brought in to flesh the movies out.
This might raise some questions: how is the work actually written? How does it read? It’s not a novel, nor is it written as a news story. It’s not fiction in the sense that it’s a story, but it is written about a fictional family. I would compare it most closely with a high school Social Studies textbook, in that it hits all of the major events of the Skywalker Saga, but doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing them from a big-picture view. You’ll hear about the Battle of Coruscant in the ways that it affected Anakin, but most of the details are cut. (Which, honestly, the book is mostly well-cropped in what it chooses to include and exclude from major events.)
At first, this type of book didn’t interest me a ton. I love the Visual Dictionaries, as they can tell stories through new details on blasters or ships, but this seemed like a guidebook without the images or new materials. Thankfully, I was wrong, and this book does bring some interesting angles to the table. Because the book focuses on the eponymous family, rather than an event or single character, it can go deeper on characters that other books skip over. For example, a lot of time is spent with the matriarch of the Skywalker family, Shmi herself. While we don’t hear many new details about her, it was nice for her to get a few chapters in the spotlight, even highlighting some stuff that happened before the Jedi arrived on Tatooine. Shmi’s influence on Anakin’s life is felt throughout quite a few more chapters beyond her death. This was a really nice way to see a character who deserves more get a bit more attention.
Another strength of this book is how widely is draws on the entirety of the canon. Each movie gets covered by a few chapters, as might be expected, but The Clone Wars gets a few of its own. When the book moves to focus on Leia’s story, Princess of Alderaan even gets two chapters! Non-movie stories serve as a sort of glue, or bridge, holding the movies together, explaining a bit more of how we move from point A to point B. For example, the stories of Shu-Torun (focusing on Queen Trios) and the first volume of the Star Wars comic are discussed to field the gap between the events of Yavin and Hoth, and are treated as just as important as the movie stories. This alone might justify the book for some fans, I think. One of the strengths of visual guides is having comics, TV shows, movies, and books all displayed in the same medium, and this serves that function (within the medium of text). Many types of stories are covered, like Age of Republic: Anakin Skywalker, The Clone Wars, Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, Moving Target, Bloodline, and The Rise of Skywalker.
These canonical connections do something for the narrative of the book, a welcome surprise. It would’ve been easy for Baver to list all the planets that the Rebels visited during the Galactic Civil War, but these connections serve to illuminate each character’s growth and changes. For example, as I brought up before, Leia’s relationship with Kier Domadi demonstrates Leia’s relationships with people close to her; Luke’s run-in with Boba on Tatooine shows how fruitless his initial quest for Ben’s help is. I really appreciated seeing these stories brought into the larger conversation with the films, which helped make the whole story a lot more cohesive. (Never did I imagine I’d read about the events of the 2015 Princess Leia mini-series alongside discussions of Exegol, but this book provides.)
This might be one of the strongest elements of the book at large. Baver knows how the stories connect and is able to bring a lot of emotional connections. One example, which I don’t think is new, is how she compares Anakin and Padmé on Mustafar to Luke’s offer for Vader to come back to the light on the forest moon of Endor. Baver can bring the emotion out from behind Vader’s mask, a believable and interesting look into the doubt and need for acceptance that lays behind Vader’s fury.
I do want to address a few quibbles I had with the book. These critiques (largely) don’t affect my enjoyment of the book, but they did, at times, either pull me out of the narrative or make me wonder for whom the books were written. For the most part, my biggest question reading the book was whom the target audience was. Some characters are introduced without introductions, but talked about as if we have already met them. It is not until a few paragraphs later that we learn who these characters are. For example, Ahsoka was written about first as someone captured by the Daughter on Mortis. Only paragraphs later do we learn that she’s Anakin’s Padawan, after a full chapter has already detailed Anakin’s exploits in the Clone War. Later, Han and Chewbacca are introduced in the context of the Death Star run, and later given introductions.
This doesn’t apply only to characters: sometimes, events are detailed in non-chronological order, sometimes without proper framing to the events already written about. After the first half of one of the chapters talks about Luke’s battle with the First Order on Crait, the next half jumps back in time to focus on Leia being thrown out of the Raddus. Really, none of these introductions are a grievous offense, but especially if you have already seen the films or read the material beforehand. But for someone unfamiliar with who Ahsoka is, the introduction might be jarring, and might cause them to re-read previous chapters trying to find her.
The only reason I bring up these critiques is because they make it hard for me to suggest this to the audience who would enjoy it the best. On one hand, people who consume the entire canon might enjoy seeing all of these stories together, as it is one of the first published works that ties all nine Saga films together. But for those readers, there isn’t a lot of new material, which might be a draw. For those who haven’t read everything, they might enjoy reading about some of the other events that have happened around the films, but wouldn’t know where to look to read them, and often only have some brief sketches of other stories. Especially as this book comes with a bit smaller of a price tag at 320 pages, I can recommend that if you’re interested in the book, you’ll enjoy yourself reading it. If you’re not sold beforehand, this might be one of those books that makes for a fun beach read, but maybe not a must-have.
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