Aftermath arrived with an enormous job: open the thirty-year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, establish that the new canon had a plan, and do it without the original trilogy's leads carrying the book. It half-succeeds, and the half that fails is the half everybody talks about.
The prose
Let us do this first. Chuck Wendig writes in present tense, in short verbless fragments, with a taste for the sardonic aside. Like this. All the time. Every page. It is a deliberate stylistic choice with a real pedigree in crime fiction, and in a Star Wars novel it lands like a dropped tray. Many readers cannot get past the first chapter, and I do not think they are being precious. The style actively resists the register the material wants.
What it does buy, occasionally, is immediacy — the Akiva street fighting has a jittery, present-tense panic that a more conventional prose would smooth away. The cost is that nothing can ever be still.
The structure is the good part
Wendig's actual plotting is much better than his reputation suggests. The novel is built as a heist-adjacent ensemble: five strangers with incompatible goals converge on one planet during a secret Imperial conference. Norra Wexley, a rebel pilot who went home and found her son grown and angry; Sinjir Rath Velus, an Imperial loyalty officer who has quietly stopped believing; Jas Emari, a bounty hunter with a family debt. The team assembles well, and the interpersonal friction is written with more care than the sentences are.
The interludes
Between chapters, Wendig drops one- and two-page vignettes from elsewhere in the galaxy: a slave revolt, a statue coming down, a crashed pilot, a rumour spreading. These are the best writing in the book and the most valuable thing in it. They do what a novel about the fall of an empire actually needs to do — establish that the fall is uneven, chaotic, and experienced differently everywhere.
Sinjir
The standout character, and the one Wendig's voice actually suits. A torturer with a conscience arriving too late, drinking through the consequences, funny in a way that is clearly a defence mechanism. Everything he says works. He is the reason to keep going into the sequels.
What it is for
Read it for the shape of the post-Endor galaxy, and specifically for the setup that pays off at the Battle of Jakku in Empire's End. The trilogy improves markedly across its three volumes as Wendig gets more comfortable and the ensemble beds in. If you want the same period done better, Lost Stars covers the run-up to Jakku with far more grace.
Who should read it
Readers building the canon timeline, and anyone who can tolerate the voice — and I want to be fair here, a substantial number of people genuinely like it. Try a sample before you buy. This is the rare Star Wars novel where the style is a hard filter rather than a matter of taste.
