Review- Alphabet Squadron
I recently finished the new Star Wars book “Alphabet Squadron”. As of a fan of the old-school Rogue Squadron series I was eager to try out a new canon series that focuses on a group of pilots. Since I am also a big fan of “Rebels” I was also excited to see a book featuring Hera post Rebels.
Spoiler free review: for the most part I enjoyed it. Most of the characters were interesting and the action engaging. Not as engaging as the characters from Rogue Squadron but that’s okay. They were their own characters. The book did not stick the landing though. You read it, following along as its building things up and then it just, kind of, ends. And it doesn’t even end with the main characters, but instead, this one random character we’ve had a few scenes with that has had zero impact on the plot until BIG REVEAL.
Less spoiler free review:
Following up on the ending, it annoyed me. Oh, surprise, surprise, Quell’s mentor is still alive. I hadn’t figured out he was the character of Devon that popped up in one or two scenes inserted randomly into the book. Mainly because I hadn’t given him more than a passing thought, assuming Devon’s story would intersect with the main one somewhere along the line. It doesn’t. It’s clear this will be a plot point in future books but that’s not a reason to include something in a story.
The ending of the main plot itself was okay. Part of my frustration came from the book actually ending with Devon. The rest of the frustration relates to there not really being a conclusion for Alphabet’s arc. A few of the characters had an arc resolved.
Quell is starting to come to terms with no longer working for the Empire. Chass got over her death wish. Tensent got his revenge. I liked Wyl the best but he didn’t really have an arc. Kairos was…odd. I get that she was supposed to be odd but she couldn’t communicate with anyone. How do you work with a pilot who can’t communicate? It’s clearly hard to read about a character that can’t communicate because I know nothing about her aside from a hint on how she met Adan. But I also am not really curious because she’s just there, she has very little personality.
As for Adan and IT-0, they felt creepy. And not in a good way. Adan felt like a bad guy the whole book. IT-0 had his moments but overall, a torture droid turned psychologist was more creepy than amusing. Neither of their motives were ever clear, which I think was the point, but if we were supposed to like them by the end, it didn’t work.
The big battle at the end defied belief a little. It’s Star Wars so that’s okay. But five ships, four really and then only three, holding off two to four times their number (this was never clear) of the most elite and scary TIE squadron didn’t feel right. Mostly this was because we didn’t know what Alphabet was trying to do so couldn’t judge how close they were to failure.
We knew they weren’t going to die. There’s too few of them and the build to unique. With the Rogue Squadron, except for Wedge, and Corran, any of them could die and some did. There were would be replacements and the books would keep going. With Alphabet, if any of them die, the concept falls apart.
That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We can enjoy a tense scene and fear failure without worrying about character death. But I didn’t know what they were trying to accomplish. They came in first, and blasted the hangar doors. This was good. It gave them reasonable numbers to fight. But then, what was next? The ground team blew the stations reactor in order to what? Was that what caused the firestorm? Or was Quell blowing the fuel tank? But the firestorm aside, what was their goal? Why was Hera’s fleet sitting around doing nothing?
All that aside, it was an enjoyable read. The ending had some issues but that could be resolved in later books. Though, I prefer books resolving themselves with hints of unresolved threads. Maybe they should have clearly marked Devon/Keize final chapter as epilogue. Then I wouldn’t have read it assuming more main plot.
