Cobalt Squadron

Just finished this book. Meh.

I guess I should cut it more slack, due to its place as a "middle grade canon novel". However, many of these young adult titles have been good in the past (most notably, the wonderful Lost Stars). But the writing here is sub-par. Everything said is repeated around one hundred times. The "action" is low key and a bit bland. Another case of not correctly working a story into the overarching SW history and shared universe.

Mostly about Rose and Paige Tico, flying those ungainly looking StarFortresses. Man those things die easily. What a terrible ship. Everything about it is dumb. A big bomber that magnetically drops magnetic bombs, in space, wherein magnetism will guide the bombs to their target. Tail gunner, bottom gunner, but no top gunner. Guess they skipped that part of WWII bomber design. Look, I like  B-17s. I even like the Lancaster, which this author apparently got to fly in as prep for writing this book. But these things just aren't Star Wars. Sorry. Bad design, worse execution. Follows none of the pre-exisiting tech. Just poor all around. And they are so easily shot down that I wonder why anyone would want to set out in such a death trap.

One thing the book confirms is that the events of The Last Jedi take place about 3 days after the events of The Force Awakens. Which is dumb, as in TFA the First Order is a secret society that nobody has heard of and by TLJ the First Order is sweeping across the galaxy. Right. Terrible screenplay.

This book, along with TLJ, plays an un-compelling brand of small ball using uninteresting characters and jarringly bad tech decisions. These people, quite simply, don't know what they're doing.

I guess some blame has to land on people like Pablo Hidalgo, a former part time Winnipeg-based, freelance artist who did some work for WEG, and somehow parlayed that into a high level Lucasfilms career. The SW RPG from WEG was waaaayyy better than this sequel trilogy pile of junk in terms of internal consistency and world building. This is high profile amateur hour, comparatively.

Sad.