Legacy of the Force had one job that no previous Star Wars series had attempted: turn a hero the reader has watched grow up into the villain of the next war, without cheating. Betrayal is the first of nine, and Aaron Allston spends it doing the unglamorous work of making the fall plausible rather than dramatic.
The political setup
Corellia is refusing to disarm and the Galactic Alliance is not prepared to let it. Allston writes the crisis as a genuine constitutional dispute in which both sides have a case — the Alliance is overreaching, and Corellia is being led by people who want a war — and the Solo family lands on different sides of it. Han and Leia siding with Corellia against their own government is the correct and painful choice, and it establishes early that this series will not be resolved by identifying the bad guy.
Jacen
The novel’s real subject. Allston’s method is to make every individual step defensible: Jacen Solo does not want power, he wants to prevent a catastrophe he has genuinely foreseen, and each compromise is smaller than the disaster it averts. By the last chapter he has killed a fellow Jedi who was trying to stop him, and the reader can trace exactly how he got there. That traceability is the whole achievement.
Lumiya
Bringing back a villain from the 1980s Marvel comics was an odd choice that mostly works, because Allston uses her as a teacher rather than a threat. She does not corrupt Jacen. She provides a vocabulary for conclusions he has already reached, which is how it actually happens.
Ben Solo, apprentice
Ben Skywalker — thirteen, Luke and Mara’s son, and by some distance the most interesting new character in the sequence — attaches himself to Jacen, which gives the fall a witness who cannot yet read what he is seeing. See the dossier.
Where it strains
It is an opening volume and it behaves like one: much of the running time is board-setting, several threads are opened and left, and the Adumar material at the start is an Allston in-joke for readers of his X-Wing novels. The prose is efficient and unmemorable, and the nine-book format means nothing here reaches a conclusion.
Who should read it
Readers who have finished the New Jedi Order and want the Legends timeline’s last great tragedy. Do not start the Expanded Universe here — it assumes twenty years of prior reading and makes no allowance for anyone who lacks it. See the Legacy era page for where it lands.
