Han Solo and Chewbacca want to make an honest living, but things seem to just keep getting in the way of that - not to mention their income is low. So when Badure, an old friend, pays them a visit with news of how he knows the location of Xim the Despot’s legendary treasure, they have a hard time saying no to going along to grab it. However, when they reach the planet the treasure is located on, they face many more obstacles than they bargained for…
How satisfying did I find Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, the final novel in Brian Daley’s trilogy? Read on to find out! Also check out Iurus's reviews of the first two novels in the series here and here if you haven't already.
When I started
Lost Legacy, I was initially pretty bored with the book. It wasn’t
terrible, but it certainly didn’t jump out at me as great, either.
However, I hung in there and tried my best to enjoy the book (despite
not enjoying its predecessor, Han Solo’s Revenge). I soon found
myself pleasantly surprised with just how much I enjoyed this fun
adventure.One of the first things that jumped out at me was the characterizations of Han Solo and Chewbacca (mostly the former character). Daley really aced these two, as I could easily picture Harrison Ford saying 99% of the lines said by Han in this novel. But notice how I specified 99%. There was one point near the ending where Han decided to take a leap of faith and trust an enemy of his, Gallandro, despite their rocky history. He came very close to dying for this. *face palm* That didn’t seem very “Han Solo” to me, but in the big scheme of things I suppose it isn’t a big complaint.
The other characters were also pretty entertaining. Bollux and Blue Max are really appealing characters, and I liked Badure and Hasti. I would even go as far to say I would enjoy a cameo appearance by those two at some point, but at the same time… there wasn’t really anything “unique” about them, per say (about Badure and Hasti, that is. Bollux and Blue Max actually were fairly unique). When this trilogy was written, I don’t think Daley was going for anything really deep because at that time, this was just supposed to be a simple tie-in series and not much else. At least, I think so. But in light of that, it’s understandable and even expected that certain characters wouldn’t be super unique. However, despite that, they did get a fair amount of development, so that’s not a complaint; more just an observation. I did like that they didn’t go with the cliché Han/lead-female-character couple thing, though. Sure, there were hints of it, but they ended up not doing it, which was what really counted.
Daley’s writing style was very interesting. At times he was extremely descriptive with minor details, but with other cases he would skim over pretty important things. I remember a couple of times where there were decent-sized time lapses he wrote a few sentences for and that’s about it. It was just interesting to see, and I really enjoyed how he wrote some parts, but I felt other scenes could’ve used a lot more detail.
On that note - I think some of the stories Daley wrote into this novel could’ve used some more screen time. Sometimes it all felt very scattered and as if “main” plots were simply forgotten in place of new ones, then went back to later on abruptly. The one that I felt was mostly an afterthought was pretty much the entire plot with Gallandro; he’s not really present until about 2/3’s through the book, and even then, he doesn’t get a lot of screen time until near the ending. It’s like Daley threw him in because he felt he had to with Han Solo’s Revenge’s plot.
I thought the villains could also have gotten much more development than they did. We barely even saw them, which was silly because in the beginning (or near the beginning, at least) they were set up as these big, bad, evil people. But they received no development, and as a pair of twins with a giant henchman backing them up, I think they all had potential to be much cooler than they turned out to be.
But despite some of the complaints I have (both major and minor), I actually did enjoy Lost Legacy. It especially picked up about halfway through, and I’m not even really sure why that was the point in which I started liking it more. The action did seem to pick up at this point (which I actually think was part of the reason for me liking it more from then on), which was one strong point of Lost Legacy; I really thought the action scenes were well written and overall very solid.
Daley also succeeded in not making Han too much of a Gary-Stu character, which actually is pretty easy to do for a book like this (a movie tie-in, centering on a main character who has to win, etc). Han actually got his butt kicked by Gallandro at the end, showing some nice realism.
So, overall, I really did like Lost Legacy. Sure, I have some pretty big complaints, but I kind of went in expecting that because I wasn’t really satisfied with Han Solo’s Revenge, and in my opinion this is just the type of novel that would have some plot holes. The characters were all very entertaining, and though the story was sometimes scattered, I thought it was for the most part solid. Han Solo and the Lost Legacy is a satisfying conclusion to Brian Daley’s trilogy, and a fun romp through the Star Wars galaxy, but nothing deeper than that. I’d certainly recommend it to people who have read the two previous books, or just want a short, fun book to check out sometime.
