Title: Phasma
Canon Timeline Placement: Before Episode VII
Length: 44 chapters, 380 pages
Welcome to our review of Star Wars canon novels and more. While this is not intended to be a full-blown, thorough book review, we do hope to give you enough information – but not too much – about each canon Star Wars publication. Again, we will try to avoid spoilers but read at your own risk…
Plasma was released in September 2017 and was written by Delilah S. Dawson. The story gives us the background on Captian Phasma, the silver-armored leader of the First Order in The Force Awakens.
The book reviews Phasma’s time before joining the First Order, how she came into contact with the First Order and proved her value to their leadership, and later her rise to greatness. In addition, it explains her personal interactions with her own family members and paints the picture of what Phasma would do to achieve power. Finally, the unique, shiny silver armor’s origin is also revealed.
The published book description:
One of the most cunning and merciless officers of the First Order, Captain Phasma commands the favor of her superiors, the respect of her peers, and the terror of her enemies. But for all her renown, Phasma remains as virtually unknown as the impassive expression on her gleaming chrome helmet. Now, an adversary is bent on unearthing her mysterious origins—and exposing a secret she guards as zealously and ruthlessly as she serves her masters.
Deep inside the Battlecruiser Absolution, a captured Resistance spy endures brutal interrogation at the hands of a crimson-armored stormtrooper—Cardinal. But the information he desires has nothing to do with the Resistance or its covert operations against the First Order.
What the mysterious stormtrooper wants is Phasma’s past—and with it whatever long-buried scandal, treachery, or private demons he can wield against the hated rival who threatens his own power and privilege in the ranks of the First Order. His prisoner has what Cardinal so desperately seeks, but she won’t surrender it easily. As she wages a painstaking war of wills with her captor, bargaining for her life in exchange for every precious revelation, the spellbinding chronicle of the inscrutable Phasma unfolds. But this knowledge may prove more than just dangerous once Cardinal possesses it—and once his adversary unleashes the full measure of her fury.
My overall opinion of Phasma is positive – positive enough to consider it one of my Top 5 canon novels thus far. Having now read several of the canon novels currently in publication, this was an interesting read, and as the book neared its end I had a harder time putting it down. It was an good read overall so I will give it a rating of 7.5 out of 10.
