Star Wars: The High Republic: Path of Deceit by: Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland

 

Has it really been a year since I last had a Star Wars book exchange? Yes.  Okay, so there was a book exchange in between this and my last one, but that wasn’t for a book, but now I’m jumping back into The High Republic with Path of Deceit, the beginning of the second phase of the publishing initiative and a novel cowritten by Justina Ireland and Tessa Gratton, a writing team that would eventually keep publishing together outside of Star Wars as a franchise.  Gratton and Ireland are a great team in terms of cowriting a novel together, their styles throughout Path of Deceit combine incredibly well to make a novel where it’s difficult to tell what’s Gratton and what’s Ireland, even though I have already read a book from Ireland in this series.  Path of Deceit, despite being very much in the young adult series of novels, feels just as much a mission statement for what the second phase of The High Republic is going to be as Light of the Jedi was despite my issues with the latter.  This second phase is a prequel to the first, looking into the origins of the conflict, a la the prequel trilogy.  Writing prequels are generally difficult: the audience already knows where the story is going and where the characters are going to end up, the first phase of The High Republic working because it is so far removed from the rest of Star Wars it can avoid these traps.  This second phase has a needle to thread, it has to satisfactorily set up the first phase of The High Republic after the fact without becoming too predictable.

 

Path of Deceit does a great job of setting up the seeds of the conflict for this second phase that is clearly going to evolve into the Nihil conflict of the first phase.  After this first installment there is already a character poised to take a role down the path to become the leader of the Nihil: Marda Ro starts the novel as pessimistic in the ways the galaxy uses the Force as part of the Path of the Open Hand, a group of missionaries with a fascinating relationship to the Force.  The idea from them is that the Force is something to be observed and not touched, creating a fascinating ideological divide that by the end of the novel Marda has been betrayed by the Mother in charge of the Path of the Open Hand, yet still finds herself committed to the cause.  The Path ends the novel by becoming an outright militant force bent on expansion, but Marda has this uncertainty.  Early in the novel she meets Jedi Padawan Kevmo Zink, who immediately flirts and tries to impress her by using the Force.  It’s this immediate clash of ideologies that horrifies Marda to her very core, it’s genuinely the best scene in the book and sets up exactly what the conflict is going to be.  Gratton and Ireland get the reader to understand exactly what is going through Marda’s mind by framing this basic act as a careless violation of something sentient, an oddly heavy theme to explore in a novel aimed at children, but nevertheless one that is great.

 

Much of the novel’s plot also assists in this exploration of views of the Force by feeling quite episodic.  Yes there is an overarching plot, but where Path of Deceit excels is honestly in one of its episode when a flood happens and the cast of characters have to stop what they’re doing to make sure that people are safe and make it through.  Thematically it also very much represents the mental state everyone is in at this point, but because it is a natural disaster it makes a difference from having to fight classic science fiction villain archetypes.  It helps define the Jedi Order of this time as well, Kevmo’s character being often too brash for his own good, he’s very much still the student with the potential to become the master.  Where the novel leaves him, however, is genuinely a tragic fall because he feels like there was a time where he could have been the major protagonist for the second phase’s young adult line of novels.  That may have been a bit too similar to what the first phase was doing so Gratton and Ireland likely made the right call, but the ending of the novel just brims with a lot of tragedy.

 

Overall, Path of Deceit is a far stronger start for the second phase of Star Wars’ The High Republic initiative.  It excels because it is focused on exploring different views of the Force to create its conflict, becoming slightly less interesting when it becomes clear who the central villain of the book actually is.  Gratton and Ireland have a novel intentionally paralleling both The Phantom Menace (and starting a fall from grace far better than the prequels) and what the first phase was doing without outright repeating the plots.  8/10.