Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge – A Crash of Fate
Hardcover | Kindle | Audiobook
Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge book 1
Written by Zoraida Cordova
Narrated by Brittany Pressley
Publisher: Disney Lucasfilm Press | Listening Library
Release date: August 6, 2019

In Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge – A Crash of Fate, the first of a new series of books centered around the Black Spire Outpost on the planet Batuu, Jules and Izzy are the best of friends. They do everything together. And when you’re six and five years old, respectively, living in the last known habitable outpost on the edge of wildspace, you come to rely on having that friend. You need each other.

When Izzy’s family up and leaves in the middle of the night with no warning whatsoever and no chance for the kids to say good-bye, to say your life has been upended is an understatement.

Star Wars: Myths & Fables
Hardcover | Kindle | Audiobook
Written by George Mann
Narrated by James Monroe Iglehart
Publisher: Disney Lucasfilm Press | Listening Library
Release date: August 6, 2019

Back in college, I took a class on short stories. As a result of what I learned, I have carried a deep love of the form throughout my adult life. So, imagine my joy when Star Wars: Myths & Fables, a collection of short stories set in a galaxy far, far away, was thrown my way.

Okay, so writer George Mann is not the first to offer up Star Wars short stories. He’s not even the first to do it since George Lucas sold the rights to this universe to Disney (that honor goes to 2017’s multi-authored collection From a Certain Point of View). This is, however, the first time I can recall in which a single author wrote an entire collection of short stories that all share a similar voice and style.

Only Ashes Remain
Hardcover | Kindle
Market of Monsters, Book #2
Written by Rebecca Schaeffer
Publisher: HMH Books For Young Readers
Release date: September 3, 2019

Only Ashes Remain is Rebecca Schaeffer‘s sequel to last year’s breakout debut Not Even Bones and, let me just get this out of the way right now, it most certainly does not suffer from the dreaded “sophomore slump” that tends to afflict many creators in the entertainment industry.

Our “unnatural” heroine Nita returns, but under the protection of INHUP (International Non-Human Police), an agency that not only protects humans from the dangerous non-humans living amongst us in this alternate reality, but also protects non-dangerous non-humans such as Nita from both dangerous non-humans as well as the very paranoid and sometimes more dangerous humans who tend to think of everyone unlike themselves as being a threat.

Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds
Hardcover | Kindle | Paperback | Audiobook
Stranger Things, Book 1
Written by Gwenda Bond
Publisher: Del Rey
Release date: February 5, 2019

Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds is the first official book to be published that’s set in the fictional world of early 1980s Hawkins, Indiana, from Netflix’s Stranger Things and features some of the characters we have come to know and love from the three seasons of the hit streaming series.

But for this story, we travel a bit further back. To 1969, in fact. This is when Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine’s character) and his young ward, Kali (or “008” as we’ve come to know her), arrive at Hawkins National Laboratory to expand upon his experiments on the human mind. To aid in his tests, he recruits four college-aged kids chosen because of promising capabilities they’ve displayed.

Star Wars: Thrawn: Treason
Hardcover | Kindle | Audiobook
Star Wars: Thrawn, Book 3
Written by Timothy Zahn
Narrated by Marc Thompson
Publisher: Del Rey Books | Random House Audio
Release date: July 23, 2019

Timothy Zahn returns with his denouement in his new canon trilogy of tales about Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn titled Star Wars: Thrawn: Treason.

In it, Grand Admiral Thrawn butts heads with Director Orson Krennic over project funding. Thrawn believes the future of the Empire, at least in the years leading up to Episode IV: A New Hope, is his TIE Defender project. Krennic, on the other hand, is certain the Empire can only hope to survive if his Stardust* project even if it has been delayed and run a bit over budget.