Queen's Peril

Main Review:

With Boris and Trump seemingly competing for who can be the most infuriating leader in recent memory, I decided for my latest read it was time to return to one of the few elected officials worth their salt – light-of-my-life Padmé Amidala. Those of you who have been reading these reviews for a while might recall that I wrote about a Padmé centred novel last year: Queen’s Shadow was a very enjoyable, if ultimately forgettable, tale of intrigue and assassination in a Galaxy Far Far Away. For the follow up, Johnston goes further back in time, focusing on Queen Amidala, rather than Senator Amidala for the optimistically entitled Queen’s Peril.

I have to admit, I was more than a little confused by this book coming out after Shadow, as the two stories are tied together so tightly that it seems better to read the books according to their internal chronology, rather than their publishing dates. But then again, Star Wars has been built on their stories coming out in a non-standard order – so maybe this arrangement is just par for the course, and could even be intentional.

As was the case with Shadow, Padmé is not the sole protagonist of this story, and each member of her loyal band of handmaidens gets their chance to shine in the story. Rather than young adults as they were in Shadow, Amidala and co are distinctly teenagers during the story, and the book ramps up the teen drama of the whole thing up to eleven. We watch as Padme and her loyal friends each wrangle with the question of what sort of person they are and who they want to be. Not only must they figure this as individuals, but also work together to ensure that “Queen Amidala” (whether that is Padmé herself or one of the body doubles in the dress) is protected at all times. Conversations can jump from discussions about how to make the queen’s wardrobe resistant to blaster fire to hushed conversations about “who likes who” in a moment. To my great delight, the obvious unresolved feelings between Padmé and her chief handmaiden Sabé leads to a great amount of pining through. It had flowed as a constant undercurrent throughout Shadow, but it now made even more explicit – with the pair caught between their growing feelings for each other and the responsibilities they have to manage with their respective roles. Another thing of note, perhaps because of its coming-of-age focus and largely teenage girl cast, is that it featured multiple references to menstruation, a topic practically unheard of in mainstream science fiction. Whilst I can’t say that having periods mentioned made the story objectively better, it was refreshing to have such a commonplace thing mentioned so casually, rather than another tired sexual assault story-line.

The ‘Peril’ of the title refers to the fact that just after halfway through the story – the book catches up to the events of The Phantom Menace – with the Trade Federation arriving to blockade the planet. From this point on – the story shifts gears from a fairly light-hearted teen drama into a more serious YA style action story. Much maligned as the trade delegations and taxation laws of The Phantom Menace were by certain overly vocal members of the Star Wars Fandom, the blockade is little more than set-dressing within the film. Johnston has taken clear action to change this – with explicit attention made to the plight of the people left on the planet in the grips of the Trade Federation. The tension in these later sections is palpable, with several characters being rounded up into internment camps by the occupying forces. Although we know that things will eventually work out, it remains fairly dark throughout, including one notable section where one of the handmaidens (only 12 years old) is taken into interrogation by the Trade Federation forces. I promise I do read cheery books sometimes.

Sticking so closely to the events of The Phantom Menace does make the book seem more like an expansion or a re-telling rather than an original story – and it put me in mind of the Ancient Greek adaptations I enjoy so much. Queen’s Peril changes the lens through which we see familiar events, forcing us to become aware of events that exist in the periphery of the film itself. In places though, the story just seems to zoom past, with Johnston simply throwing recognisable moments as way-markers for the audience to orient themselves. I did feel that the book could easily (and arguably should) have been at least double the length it was, to allow it to fully commit to being an expansion of the story of The Phantom Menace. Johnston write the characters so well I was disappointed to have finished it as quickly as it did.

The quibble about length exacerbates the main issue I had with the book. It frequently took detours away from Padmé and co to shine the spotlight on other well-known characters from the era. Some of these excursions made sense and added to the story in a very positive way. A lot of the humour of the book came from the increasingly frustrated Captain Panaka having rings run around him by the handmaidens. But most of the side characters, including multiple Jedi, Chancellor Palpatine and Jar-Jar Binks amongst others, felt wholly unnecessary, at least within the context of the story being told. Given the story is already fairly short – not even 300 pages long - I was left feeling more than a little short-changed. I came to the book wanting more about Padmé and the Handmaidens, if I wanted to hear about Skywalker and Kenobi – I could just watch the films again. Sadly, this trend of side-lining female characters is not new to the wider Star Wars universe – with Iden Versio, the alleged protagonist of 2017’s Star Wars Battlefront II being similarly displaced from having a full narrative. I think it speaks to a wider anxiety by authors that stories set in established settings with a history of ‘nerd culture’ can’t solely focus on their female characters, and have to shoe-horn in their male counterparts to make the story palatable to toxic members of the fan-base, many of whom are likely to complain that there’s even a whiff of diversity in a setting involving millions of worlds and countless alien races.

At the end of my review of Queen’s Shadow, I joked that the story left me hungry for a sequel detailing Sabé as a rebel agent, determined to find out the truth of Padmé’s murder and eventually fighting against Panaka, now the Imperial Governor of Naboo. Having finished this second installment, I’m convinced that there’s evidence that this is the way Johnston wants to go too, especially with the increased focus on Panaka himself. With that said though, Peril lacked a sequel-baiting epilogue like the former book. With the end of Battle for Naboo – the story just fizzles out, with only a small, detached section at the end tying Padmé to her daughter – perennial icon Princess Leia. Fingers crossed we get another book in the series soon – you can never have too much of a good thing.