Join the Resistance: Escape from Vodran by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker
Join the Resistance: Escape from Vodran by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker
This was a rollicking good time of a book with a very surprising ending that I loved! While you do start to wonder, how long can these kids stay in First Order jail, it doesn't feel like it drags all that much. For 327 pages, there's quite a bit of interesting content despite the vast majority taking place in the First Order detention center.
We left Mattis and his friends (Lorica, AG-90, and Jo) at the end of the first book surrounded by First Order stormtroopers on Vodran. Klimo, the Rodian, had just been eaten alive by rancors and Dec and Sari had escaped the planet. And this book starts right where we left off, after some musings over General Leia and some recapping of events. Needless to say, the young Resistance troops do get captured and sit around for the longest time, wondering how in the world they will escape. Mattis plans on digging out a hole through the cell wall. Lorica plans to use her Zeltron powers of "mind-itching" to convince one of their captors, Ingo, to set them free. AG gets reprogrammed as a First Order droid! And Jo turncoats on the group! All essentially seems lost. Dec and Sari escape to a moon filled with droids and we don't hear much from them until the latter part of the book when Harra the Hutt appears. Harra was the original owner of Vodran before the First Order came and sent her away. All the animals lurking the planet were once her pets and she misses them dreadfully.
As for Lorica's Zeltron powers, she can manipulate the emotions of others by exuding pheromones. She can use her powers to calm down those who are upset or lean them in her direction. Mattis wonders if this is why he is so attracted to her...and perhaps its part of it since he can't stand her.
In a nifty canon connection, one of the main characters, Cost, describes being mind-sucked by a Bor Gullet!! "A bulgy, clumpy jelly thing. Sticky with tentacloids that grabbed and drank and drank. It liked my sadness and my fear and my lonely feelings. It drank them up. It took away the things I knew." Love a Rogue One connection!
And another canon connection occurs when Jo and Mattis recount Kare and Snap's wedding!! We know Kare and Snap are together then separate and just now in the Poe Dameron comic are getting back together, but now we know they actually get married! So cool. The one issue I have with this is them saying that Oddy Muva was a part of it when I'm pretty sure he has already been killed in the comic series way before a wedding between Kare and Snap possibly could have occurred.
I found it odd this book says the favored stormtrooper weapon was the FWMB-10 repeating blaster when we all know it was the E-11. Maybe this is a new First Order thing that I hadn't caught before.
When Dec and Sari land on the hidden moon, they list a bunch of different criminal organizations that might be the ones living in the bunker they come across (before they know it's droids). Besides the ones we already know and love, they list: Craygalon Marauders from Snowdn-4, The Galgardi Syndicate, the Noreeno Horde, the Estipona Party Squad (a group of cannibals), The Mangan Ring, and Bloody Montantis.
New species mentioned include: Flann (tree-like sentients), Genhu (sentients with many rows of sharp teeth, Cost is a member of this species), Nanaks (woolly, meter-tall with long arms and knobby knees, Gherd was Harra's favorite pet), axton-tarsiers (big-eyed, floppy-eared, furry pets from Ques - Dec's homeworld), ferin (another pet species from Ques), dalgos (some sort of predator).
A new vehicle is mentioned. A wheel bike that makes a "whizzing sound punctuated by a mechanical cricket-like chirp: chk, chk, chk." It seems similar to a speeder bike.
A few new planets are mentioned briefly: Cole-Haddon (inhospitable), Hreeshi (quite nice), and Kufs is the name of the "ghost moon" where Dec and Sari end up. Kufs apparently has "a slowly churning estuary of liquefied nykkalt" which is "a rare, highly vibrative precious metal that reflect[s] any light, air or even hyperspectrum frequency" causing it to reflect back ships' scans. And Dec goes into more detail about his homeworld of Ques, saying that it is a favor-based society and they don't even deal in credits except for once a cycle when the Hutts come through demanding payment for people living on "their" planet.
All in all, this was a surprisingly fast-paced book with much intrigue and sneakiness. I can imagine how this would definitely be a hit with the junior reader crowd, but I, as an adult, loved it as well. There are all sorts of character developments as we see the different characters go through different stages of grief and acceptance of their fate. And we see them team up to take on the baddies in one epic showdown involving a Hutt. The book ends with hints at another and I can't wait for the third volume in the series to be released!
We left Mattis and his friends (Lorica, AG-90, and Jo) at the end of the first book surrounded by First Order stormtroopers on Vodran. Klimo, the Rodian, had just been eaten alive by rancors and Dec and Sari had escaped the planet. And this book starts right where we left off, after some musings over General Leia and some recapping of events. Needless to say, the young Resistance troops do get captured and sit around for the longest time, wondering how in the world they will escape. Mattis plans on digging out a hole through the cell wall. Lorica plans to use her Zeltron powers of "mind-itching" to convince one of their captors, Ingo, to set them free. AG gets reprogrammed as a First Order droid! And Jo turncoats on the group! All essentially seems lost. Dec and Sari escape to a moon filled with droids and we don't hear much from them until the latter part of the book when Harra the Hutt appears. Harra was the original owner of Vodran before the First Order came and sent her away. All the animals lurking the planet were once her pets and she misses them dreadfully.
As for Lorica's Zeltron powers, she can manipulate the emotions of others by exuding pheromones. She can use her powers to calm down those who are upset or lean them in her direction. Mattis wonders if this is why he is so attracted to her...and perhaps its part of it since he can't stand her.
In a nifty canon connection, one of the main characters, Cost, describes being mind-sucked by a Bor Gullet!! "A bulgy, clumpy jelly thing. Sticky with tentacloids that grabbed and drank and drank. It liked my sadness and my fear and my lonely feelings. It drank them up. It took away the things I knew." Love a Rogue One connection!
And another canon connection occurs when Jo and Mattis recount Kare and Snap's wedding!! We know Kare and Snap are together then separate and just now in the Poe Dameron comic are getting back together, but now we know they actually get married! So cool. The one issue I have with this is them saying that Oddy Muva was a part of it when I'm pretty sure he has already been killed in the comic series way before a wedding between Kare and Snap possibly could have occurred.
I found it odd this book says the favored stormtrooper weapon was the FWMB-10 repeating blaster when we all know it was the E-11. Maybe this is a new First Order thing that I hadn't caught before.
When Dec and Sari land on the hidden moon, they list a bunch of different criminal organizations that might be the ones living in the bunker they come across (before they know it's droids). Besides the ones we already know and love, they list: Craygalon Marauders from Snowdn-4, The Galgardi Syndicate, the Noreeno Horde, the Estipona Party Squad (a group of cannibals), The Mangan Ring, and Bloody Montantis.
New species mentioned include: Flann (tree-like sentients), Genhu (sentients with many rows of sharp teeth, Cost is a member of this species), Nanaks (woolly, meter-tall with long arms and knobby knees, Gherd was Harra's favorite pet), axton-tarsiers (big-eyed, floppy-eared, furry pets from Ques - Dec's homeworld), ferin (another pet species from Ques), dalgos (some sort of predator).
A new vehicle is mentioned. A wheel bike that makes a "whizzing sound punctuated by a mechanical cricket-like chirp: chk, chk, chk." It seems similar to a speeder bike.
A few new planets are mentioned briefly: Cole-Haddon (inhospitable), Hreeshi (quite nice), and Kufs is the name of the "ghost moon" where Dec and Sari end up. Kufs apparently has "a slowly churning estuary of liquefied nykkalt" which is "a rare, highly vibrative precious metal that reflect[s] any light, air or even hyperspectrum frequency" causing it to reflect back ships' scans. And Dec goes into more detail about his homeworld of Ques, saying that it is a favor-based society and they don't even deal in credits except for once a cycle when the Hutts come through demanding payment for people living on "their" planet.
All in all, this was a surprisingly fast-paced book with much intrigue and sneakiness. I can imagine how this would definitely be a hit with the junior reader crowd, but I, as an adult, loved it as well. There are all sorts of character developments as we see the different characters go through different stages of grief and acceptance of their fate. And we see them team up to take on the baddies in one epic showdown involving a Hutt. The book ends with hints at another and I can't wait for the third volume in the series to be released!
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