Every optimistic setting needs a book that takes the optimism apart, and the High Republic scheduled its early. Light of the Jedi spent four hundred pages establishing that the Republic is confident, expansive and good at disaster response. The Rising Storm puts all of that on a stage, in public, at a party, and then lets the Nihil in.
The Republic Fair
Chancellor Lina Soh’s Fair on Valo is a superb piece of construction: a trade exposition designed as a propaganda answer to the Great Disaster, with Jedi as guests of honour and the whole galaxy watching the holofeeds. It is the Republic’s thesis rendered as an event. Cavan Scott spends the first half of the novel building it in loving, slightly excessive detail, and the reader knows exactly what that detail is for.
The attack
When it comes it is genuinely nasty, and — importantly — it is not a military operation. Marchion Ro is not trying to take Valo. He is trying to be seen, by everyone, at once, and to demonstrate that the Jedi cannot cover a crowd. Star Wars villains usually want a planet. This one wants footage. That is a modern idea handled without smugness, and it gives the Nihil a coherence they lacked in the first novel.
Loden Greatstorm
The book’s emotional spine runs through a captured Jedi Master and the apprentice who does not know he is alive. Bell Zettifar’s half of it is the strongest character writing in Phase I — a young Jedi being taught, in the least abstract way available, that the Order’s serenity is a practice rather than a state. See the dossier.
Where it strains
The cast is too large. Scott is servicing a shared-universe plot with a dozen leads and several tie-in obligations, and there are perhaps four characters here who get enough room to become people. Elzar Mann’s arc — a Jedi with an appetite problem the Order has no vocabulary for — deserves twice the space it gets. The prose is brisk and slightly flat, and the Fair sequences occasionally read like a location list.
Where it sits
Second adult novel of Phase I, between Light of the Jedi and The Fallen Star. It genuinely does need the first book; it does not need the young-adult volumes, though Into the Dark makes it richer.
Who should read it
Anyone who found the first novel a little too pleased with itself. This is the correction, and it is meaner, faster and more focused than what it follows.
