Sarah's Reviews > Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The remnants of the Empire have reforged as the First Order, led by a mysterious power known as Snoke. The Rebels, now branded the Resistance, attempt to protect the nascent New Republic. They are led by Leia Organa Solo, who's searching for her brother, Luke Skywalker, last of the Jedi, who vanished years ago. He left a map behind—most of it has been archived in the Empire’s library, but the last part is within a Resistance droid. This droid—a brave little snowman-shaped specimen named BB-8—is hunted by the First Order. Protecting him, the Resistance pilot Poe Demaron is captured by Kylo Ren, a First Order commander who hides himself under a silver-striped helmet and a black cloak.

BB-8 escapes into the sandy wastes of Jakku, a giant junkyard with a mysterious ability to suppress the Force. Eventually he runs into Rey, an orphan girl who ekes out a meager living by salvaging working parts from wrecked spacecraft. Rey acts tough, but has a gentle heart, and takes the droid in.

Meanwhile, a young Stormtrooper is traumatized by his first battle and shakes off his conditioning. He frees Poe and they escape, after antagonizing their enemy like the crazy boys they are. Poe gives his new chum, coded FN-2187, the name Finn. But they were piloting separate crafts, and when they crash far apart on Jakku each young man assumes his new friend dead.

Finn stumbles around the desert until he reaches the outpost where Rey lives, and she begrudgingly accepts him as an ally—and after a few scrapes, a friend. They flee Jakku when the First Order bombs the outpost, in a lemon lying around the junkyard that turns out to be the Millennium Falcon. It should surprise no one that, having had his ship stolen from him, Han Solo has been tracking it down for some time, and Chewbacca is there with him. They quickly learn that Finn, Rey, and BB-8 are on their side.

They land on the sylvan planet Takodana so Han can consult the old pirate Maz Kanata, who serves all manner of rogues in the dining hall of her lakeside castle. Han and Finn are both scheming how to weasel out of joining the Resistance—Han and Leia are still technically married but haven’t spoken in years—and while Maz chides the men for their cowardice, Rey (accompanied by her loyal little droid) follows a mysterious noise into the castle’s basement.

Here she discovers a relic—a lightsaber—and has a terrifying vision. Some of these scenes already happened; others are “the shadows of things that will be or might be” (hat tip to A Christmas Carol ). In many she’s being stalked by an aggressive being in a black cloak and mask, wielding a giant red lightsaber. Maz finds her crying and tries to explain, but Rey flees rashly into the forest, BB-8 at her heels.

On a cold and sterile planet called Starkiller Base, the First Order nukes an entire solar system to send the Resistance a message. Kylo Ren does not participate, and it’s implied he’s disgusted by this genocide.

Having traced the droid to Takodana, the First Order start bombing the castle. Kylo enters the woods, ostensibly looking for BB-8 but really pursuing Rey. He calls off the search for the droid and carries the girl away in his arms instead. The Resistance show up; Han and Leia struggle to face each other. We learn that what drove them apart was the loss of their son to the Dark Side…and that son, Ben, goes by Kylo Ren now.

While the Resistance debates how to take out Starkiller Base before its weapon of mass destruction can be aimed at them, Rey wakes up on the former planet, with her abductor watching her. He removes his helmet for her, revealing himself to be a human (and striking) youth. He uses his telepathy, ostensibly to scry the map, but gets sidetracked by her unhappy memories and she is able to reverse the probe and break into his head. He blurts out her most painful secret and she responds in kind. He is summoned by Snoke and takes his leave. They are thoroughly confused by each other.

Finn convinces the Resistance that he can disable the shields around Starkiller, and Han and Chewy go with him. A battle ensues in space and on the snowy planet, and all might have ended well—but Leia charged Han with bringing Ben home. Father and son meet on a bridge within the First Order fortress. Han tells the young man to drop his Dark Side pretensions and return. Kylo is unhinged, begging for help—and then skewers his father with the red saber, slaughter of one’s parents being a requirement for First Order officials. Chewy shoots him. Rey and Finn witness the monstrous crime, and Ren pursues them into the snowy forest outside.

He fights Finn and leaves him for dead, but his demeanor changes markedly when up against Rey. He is so unguarded with her that she’s able to defeat him, untrained though she is. Snoke breaks into her head and tells her to kill Kylo, but she restrains herself. Chewy takes her and Finn aboard the Falcon; Stormtroopers rescue Kylo; the planet collapses.

Finn is comatose and hospitalized. The Resistance now has the whole map to Luke, and Leia sends Rey and Chewy to find her brother. The film and the novel end with the girl offering the grizzled hermit-hero his old weapon.

This novelization reminds me of A.C.H. Smith’s one of Labyrinth, which is interesting given some thematic similarities between the films themselves (both Lucasfilm productions). Both spend way too much time on the silliest parts of their respective movies (exploding spaceships, self-dismembering firebirds) and leaving the most interesting parts (the Hades and Persephone plots and fraught family relationships in both) undercooked.

These authors barely describe their dramatis personae when they have actual actors with faces to study. Foster isn’t even necessarily accurate (at one point he mentions Rey’s “dark brown eyes” which Daisy Ridley does not have). He's sure to tell us that Poe is handsome—pointing out that Oscar Isaac is handsome is like pointing out that water is wet—but leaves Kylo almost blank. The Victorian writers would have fought each other for the chance to describe Adam Driver. Look at what I was able to scribble out:

Poe: Lor San Tekka gave Poe a fatherly smile; the young pilot’s wit and confidence reminded the elder of his long-ago friend, Han Solo. Dameron was petite but well-built. His handsome face with its chiseled, black-stubbled jaw was framed in dark waves of hair; his eyes under their thick black brows were also dark, and fiery. One knew after meeting that gaze that the young man’s snark and bravado was a façade for his single-minded devotion to his cause.

Finn (John Boyega): Poe was surprised when his rescuer removed his helmet. He had never really given any thought to what the enemy might look like under their armor, and was taken a bit aback by the kindness and sincerity of the very human face that appeared. The man was about ten years younger than himself, with deep brown skin and black hair cropped right next to his scalp. He had dark brown eyes, at the moment wide with adrenaline and absolute terror. Below those emotions Poe sensed the same fire for justice that helped him wake up every morning. This young man, braving the wrath of the whole First Order, was a kindred spirit.

Rey: Finn hadn’t exactly met a lot of girls, and he was immediately drawn to this one despite her quick-moving staff. She was only a little smaller than him, wearing the grey drab clothes of the desert folk. Her brown hair was bound and her hazel eyes bored into him with suspicion, but no malice. He felt rather pathetic splayed on the sandy ground looking up at her.

Kylo was almost certain that this was the girl he had seen in his visions. She was tiny, with a pleasant figure draped in the pleated, trailing off-white clothes of a desert-planet dweller. He paced around her, studying the clean lines of her pretty face; the large, long-lashed hazel eyes staring at him with fear and loathing; the full lips hanging open as she gasped for breath; the constellations of freckles across her nose and flushed cheeks. Her brown hair was bound tightly behind her head in three buns stacked atop each other. It was a childish style: he had the sudden urge to gently Force-pluck her hairbands and let her mane fall across her shoulders.

Kylo/Ben: Her captor removed its helmet, almost as if it had been hoping she would mention it, and rose to its—his—full, imposing height. She had been expecting some sort of monster, and was shocked to see a man between twenty-five and thirty years old staring back at her. His face was long, with full lips for a male and a nose too large for conventional beauty, pale, framed in shoulder-length waves of glossy jet-black hair like a starless night sky. He had large brown eyes, which glittered at her with unnerving intensity. No one had ever gazed at her like that, and she wriggled, nervous. He was either the ugliest or the handsomest man she had ever seen, and she felt stupid for noticing or caring…

“Don’t you know I can take whatever I want?” he asked in that low, deceptively kind voice, and he came so close that she could smell peppermint leaves on his breath. At this range she could see that his eyes were actually hazel like hers, but his erred more to brown while hers erred more to green, and his lashes were long and thick and dark like a girl’s. His pale face was spotted with sporadic moles, and the sculpted mouth hung open slightly as if he were thirsty. He leaned his head close to hers—she felt a minor headache that she supposed was him entering her mind, and at the same time she felt him breathing on her ear. If the planet below broke open and swallowed her, she would not complain.

Finn had never seen Ren unmasked, and under different circumstances he might have chuckled. The horse-like features, almost demonically twisted in rage, did not mesh with the terrifying persona.

If my scribbles sound like they’re foreshadowing a romance between Kylo/Ben and Rey, that’s because they are, because that’s what the movie did. Unfortunately, the novelization is muddled about which young man our heroine will wind up with and tries to lamely set up for all three possibilities. Her feelings for Finn are clearly sisterly in the movie, but here she seems to have a bit of a crush on him. In the book, she shares an awkward celebratory hug with Poe; in the film, they never even interact. But the impression I got from the film was that Finn has a puppy crush on Rey, Poe might be vaguely aware of her existence, and Kylo is hopelessly infatuated with her. Foster tries to downplay that last connection, dismissing Kylo as “ordinary-looking” and making him sound much snootier than he comes across in the film.

My other major complaint is the minimization of the two duels on Starkiller Base. The Kylo vs. Finn fight takes about five sentences, and the climactic chase/fight between Kylo and Rey is tucked away in two lousy paragraphs. That second scene is nothing like the average bad guy vs. good guy fight, and very much like every deadly/amorous sylvan chase in Metamorphoses, and if I were Foster I would've made it the biggest moment in the book. You know, like it is in the actual movie.

I was also baffled by the indifferent reaction Rey had to hearing a foreign, sinister voice in her head. She never thought about it after it happened, when such a troubling incident should definitely weigh upon her mind.

There’s interesting details in here, and it definitely helped me with the Kylo Ren vs. Edmund Pevensie meta I’m currently writing, but unless you too are writing a Star Wars meta—or just a mega fan of the franchise—there’s probably not much here to hold your interest. I was confused by Foster’s fascination with the shallow parts of the movie—the parts that don’t translate well in book form—and indifference to the pathos, and the most significant relationship in the story.

Supposedly the junior novelization is better. It’s also half the length, which in cases like this is often a good thing.