Manga: Star Wars Lost Stars

Star Wars: Lost Stars
Rating: 5/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher! 

The Empire can be seductive, particularly if you're an aspiring young pilot...

Thane Kyrell and Ciena Ree both know this very well when they enroll Imperial Academy, eager to pursue their dreams. When Thane discovers the darker side of the Empire, though, and defects to the Rebellion, the pair's lifelong friendship will be put to the ultimate test.

Will Thane and Ciena's relationship -- or even they themselves -- survive this galactic conflict...?

For those of you who don't know, this is adapted from a book by Claudia Gray, which I haven't actually read, but I have read one of her other series so I was expecting big things from this and I wasn't disappointed! 

Lost Stars starts with action as we enter on a X-Wing/TIE Fighter battle, chase kind of thing, before we head off to Hoth where things crossover with the movies and we get to briefly see Han and Leia which had me squealing! 

Our MC Thane smoothly slots in with them, he's out to rescue and save Ciena, his old friend...but she's with the enemy and she's kind of out to kill him. Awkward. They make their declarations pretty early on and it's almost comic, the contrast. You know "I'm going to save her" "I'm going to kill him". 

Interestingly, we jump back in time for most of the volume, seeing Thane and Ciena's friendship, how it started, their education and training at the Imperial Academy and so on. They and the other cadets don't really scream evil so it kinda changed how I looked at them. I didn't look at them and thing "Wow the Empire, they're terrible characters". I even momentarily looked at the Empire a little differently. Momentarily. Like for a few seconds. 

Nash intrigues me, he's Thane's old friend and he's from Leia's planet Alderaan and you can't tell me he's cool with what went down. I'm interested to see if he joins Thane or if he sticks with the Empire. He's a fun supporting character though! 

The story is paced nicely, there's a good amount of world building and building up of the characters as we go back in time to get to see how they became friends, how they ended up working for the Empire and in Thane's case...how he came to end up leaving. This volume shows us what sparks all of that off, and gets us ready for what's to come next because this is just the first part...the first little chunk actually, I think! 

Lost Stars smoothly ties in to the Star Wars original trilogy, and I squealed whenever I saw Leia or Han! I also particularly liked the art work, not just the OC's to the story, but Han and Leia are brilliantly drawn too and there's a lot of attention to detail to make sure it matches up with the canon! This is definitely going to be an interesting and fun story!