These High Republic Star Wars books are... not good.

In a comic book shop in 2022, I overhead a conversation between the clerk and a customer. The clerk had shared they liked Star Wars, and the customer launched into a long, impassioned, and relatively well-informed speech about all the reasons Star Wars wasn't good: the stories were derivative, the science made no sense, the characters were slapdash, whatever. The clerk listened while scanning books and futzing with the cash register. When the customer was done, the clerk responded "yeah, it sucks. I like it though."

I heard that exchange from across the store and felt like I was listening to the Buddha. That "it sucks, I like it though" counts as a valid perspective had never occurred to me. It's also really the only way to find peace in fandom; you'll rarely find yourself satisfied with everything, and once you do, you can be sure it won't last.

This book was a prime example of "it sucks, I like it though." The nonsense science in this book was an active distraction - the plot didn't hold together worth a darn at any single point. At one point a character is repairing something with a tool called a "turbohammer," which immediately invokes the classic sci-fi epithet: "I got on my cyber bike to go to the cyber bar where I ordered a cyber beer." This book was absolute trash.

I liked it, though.