On Dalna, a group known as the Path of the Open Hand wants to free the Force, and few believe more in the cause than Marda Ro. But when she meets a Jedi that captures her heart, will her heart and her head pull her in two directions? Read my review of the first part of The High Republic Phase II, Path of Deceit!
Maybe one of the most surprising things that we learned early on about Phase II of The High Republic is that the second Phase would jump 150 years earlier in the timeline than even the already early Phase I. After leaving Phase I on a multitude of cliffhangers (at least one per storytelling medium), a lot of fans, including myself, weren’t sure what to do with the information. What kind of thing would Phase II try and do? Would it be simply a way to fill in the backstory of Phases I and III? Would it try and tell its own story? With Path of Deceit, we’re (thankfully) starting to see more what the plan is. When this book was announced, the fact the main character would be a Ro immediately caught most of our attention, showing this Phase was going to fill in the backstory for Phases I and III. But the novel also wants to start the next Phase with it’s own story, too, pulling double duty.
When I first heard about the plot of the book, a member of a religious group called the Path of the Open Hand would fall in love with a Jedi, I wouldn’t say I was immediately turned away, but I wouldn’t say that I was immediately interested, either. I’m not a huge fan of romance novels, and it seemed like there were quite a few coming out around the same time under the Star Wars banner between The Princess and the Scoundrel, this novel, and the premise of The High Republic: Convergence. Besides, we’ve seen what happens when two groups that shouldn’t come together do anyway, à la Attack of the Clones, and I’m not a huge fan of romance. I was hoping to see, what I thought at the time, would be a story more immediately connected to the era in general. Thankfully, and I won’t spoil much about it, I was satisfied in the latter and enjoyed the former a bit more than I thought I would.
Marda Ro is a nicely developed character, and doesn’t rely on being a member of the Ro family to find her identity. In fact, I do think that if you started The High Republic with this novel, you would still find Marda an interesting character, even not knowing where her last name’s journey would go. She is an ardent believer in the Path of the Open Hand, a religious group that believes that the “Force should be free” and lives in communal groups that share everything freely. (I’ll return to why I put the quotes around that phrase shortly.) I felt like we spent a lot of good time with the character as she struggles to learn her place in the group and in the galaxy, both as a believer in the Path and as an Evereni. Toward the end of Phase I, Charles Soule wrote the two-part Marvel series Eye of the Storm, which explains the family history of the Ro’s and the Evereni, and this novel makes good use of the material that was set up in that series to drive her character forward. It is fairly inarguable that she is the main character, with whom we spend the most time and hear the most internal dialogue from.
Marda, as the synopsis of the book suggests, falls in love with a Pantoran Jedi named Kevmo Zink. Kevmo is a fun character, but is more of a foil to Marda than a fully developed character on his own. His character description and his depth, at times, can be described as “generically Jedi,” even though I ended up liking him by the end. At a time when it seems like Jedi are fairly rarely seen on the Outer Rim, it’s easy to see why people would be in awe or really come to like Kevmo, as Marda does. I do mostly enjoy the interaction between Marda and Kevmo, finding it fairly believable the two would start to have feelings for one another. Thankfully, the romance never seems to be terribly overblown – but I could also see that as a negative for people who were expecting a major kissing book. One thing I liked a lot about the characters is they were truly able to challenge one another, and their interactions leave the other one changed. I like reading romantic plots where the characters can truly push and challenge the other in their life.
The plot of the book doesn’t just hang on the romance, thankfully. As the synopsis suggests, there is a character called The Mother, the leader of the Path of the Open Hand, who has a plan of her own. As you might’ve seen in the new animated introduction to Path of Deceit, premiered on the This Week! in Star Wars YouTube series, a man named Sunshine finds a planet that holds many secrets that become important to the Path. Mother’s plans start to affect the lives of Marda Ro, the Path, and Kevmo and his Master, and drive the plot forward. I do feel like the plot does wax and wane at times, sometimes diving too deeply into the romance, and sometimes moving too far away from it, and there were times that I felt my own interest waning. But it’s thankfully never a whole chunk of the book, so I can’t say one part is especially slow or anything, but just the pacing felt a bit off at times. Thankfully, as we’ve seen in Out of the Shadows, which I thought started too slowly but still ended with a bang, we do get a bang in this book once the Mother’s plans come to full fruition.
There’s a lot to say about this novel that starts to really turn into spoiler territory, so I’ll keep these next few points brief but try to be as informative as I can. The first thing I want to say is that if you’re coming to this book looking for answers for a lot of the mysteries in Phase I, you’re coming to the correct place. There are hints and whispers of what’s to come throughout the novel from the beginning all of the way through the end. Some are definitely bigger than others, but I was engaged enough by these to continue reading even in places where the novel was moving really slowly for my tastes. If you’re only interested in Phase II as it relates to Phases I and III, you’ll spend your time well here.
I wanted to comment on the fact that this book was co-written by both Justina Ireland and Tessa Gratton, a new introduction to the Luminous writing team. I wondered if you would find something like two distinct chapters, where one person’s writing was more evident than the others, maybe giving certain characters to one author and the rest to the other. I personally couldn’t identify if that was the case or not. I wondered if it was something more along the lines of James SA Corey, who alternate between chapters and edit each other’s chapters so that they all sort of blend together by the end. There were aspects of the writing that felt a lot like Ireland’s work in her two middle grade books and Out of the Shadows, and I’m not familiar enough with Gratton’s work to comment on their contributions, so this kind of ended without much resolution to me. That being said, even though I didn’t feel like I could parse out who wrote what, I think that might be a good thing. Sometimes, if two writers handle the same book, you could feel a lot of tonal whiplash between the authors. Or, even worse, the book could feel disjointed, as if there were too many cooks in the kitchen. But this does come together as a coherent book, thankfully. I was nervous about the introduction of new authors in the Luminous team, but as it stands, it’s not a huge concern.
One critique I had was that the theology of the Path of the Open Hand is pretty threadbare in the novel. I’m sure the YA audience isn’t exactly interested in something like the Mother’s Summa Theologica, but I was very interested in learning about what they believe and learning about what it means for the Force to be free. Unfortunately, the Path members keep repeating the mantra without explaining a lot of what it means. Right now, it seems to me that the Force isn’t free because people use it. But why do they believe that’s an infringement on the freedom of the Force? Why do they see the Force as a zero- sum game, where using it means causing harm somewhere else? We do learn where the Path starts in the book, but we don’t learn what it means or what caused the members to believe in the Force. This group seems to be a major player in the era, so I was disappointed to walk away not knowing much more about the Path. There’s a scene in which Kevmo and Marda are kinda discussing their respective theologies, and Kevmo said that Marda was a good arguer. I disagreed, simply because she didn’t really lay out much beyond what we had already read in the book, and I didn’t walk away from their disagreement knowing more about the Path than I did before.
All in all, Path of Deceit kicks off Phase II of the High Republic with an interesting story. It serves as it’s own story, a bit more character-focused than event-focused, as Light of the Jedi was. At the end of the novel, I find myself very curious to see where the Phase is going, especially with the information we already know about it. I’m excited to see these characters and stories continue, not knowing entirely where it is going but being intrigued by the premise. But it’s unfair to say that this book only exists to kick of Phase II, as it is it’s own novel. The novel itself, despite some pacing issues, is a nice character study, setting up some interesting characters and villains, giving us a lot to look forward to when its sequel is introduced in Wave II.
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