This book took me a while to get into. I gave up on the print version a year or three ago, and even the audiobook wasn’t doing great at capturing my attention for a while—I had to rush to finish this before it was due back to Libby. I’m glad that I stuck it out, though, because I liked what I got. I never read the X-Wing novels from the old EU, but I wanted something like what I imagined they were. Alphabet Squadron ended up being the best kind of expanded universe book: Expanding on interesting ideas, filling in details, offering new perspectves, and capturing the original feel of things. This ended up feeling a lot like Andor in adding some grittiness and cynicism to Star Wars, and I was surprised how far Freed went in emphasizing that star war is star hell. I found pew pew pew spaceship fights that I’ve loved for decades to actually be quite ugly, and I’m glad for that new perspective.

• Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron
• Alexander Freed
• Star Wars
• war
• Andor
• Libby
• audiobooks
• war is hell