If that sounds disjointed, that’s because it is. Johnston’s strengths are still on display for the most part: the world-building is superb, even though we’ve seen most of it already in Queen’s Shadow. Her careful attention to relationships between women is still a rarity, and welcome, in Star Wars. But the dialogue is so flat that it’s difficult to tell one handmaiden from another, even with little introductory scenes for each of them.
Those introductory scenes are scattered throughout the book, along with other interludes that give geeky-fun glimpses into the lives of other The Phantom Menace characters. Unfortunately, the interludes don’t at all feel like complete stories by themselves. Instead of key moments in the characters’ lives, these scenes are simply sketches. As drabbles to introduce characters like Darth Maul or Yoda, they’re cute, but they don’t give any extra insight or show the characters making important decisions.
The pacing is also a problem. The novel jumps from the present day to flashbacks to interludes without giving any of these moments time to settle in. I’m interested in the details of Naboo court life, and there’s a certain completionist satisfaction in being able to picture the rooms where the handmaidens and Padmé lived and worked before the Trade Federation invasion. But Padmé’s day-to-day work as a queen is dull.
Her first major political decision has to do with agriculture, and it’s just as dry as all of The Phantom Menace’s discussion of trade routes. I kept wondering what part of this storyline was going to hook into the larger plot, expecting something to come to light that would give the mission a stronger connection to Padmé personally or illustrate a way for the handmaidens to learn how to come together as a group. There’s a suggestion that her decision affected the blockade, but no strong character through-line.
Instead, the second half of the book is a jumpy journey through The Phantom Menace, with the assumption that the reader already knows what happened in the movie. There are glimmers of interesting style here, but it all feels very rushed. Fans who have seen the movie will find little in the way of new insight. There is one particularly neat reveal about which handmaiden was in the queen’s role during the movie, but it’s fleeting.
