”Vader rumbled something under his
breath. ‘Mokivj.’

‘Indeed, my lord,’ Thrawn said. ‘More specifically, the Separatist factory on Mokivj that we once assaulted.’

Vader straightened to his full height. ‘That you once assaulted,’ he corrected. ‘No one else aboard the Chimaera was ever there.’

‘Of course,’ Thrawn said, inclining his head. ‘I misspoke.’”

3.75? Rounding up to 4 stars regardless, but first instinct is that it’s a little less than 4.

I love Thrawn so much. I think that needs to be said. He is fantastic all the time. I did miss Eli, but I loved seeing Thrawn’s dynamic with both Anakin and Vader. Especially with Thrawn casually dropping bombs that he knows Vader is Anakin, and Vader trying so hard to deny it. It’s just comedy gold, y’all.

I loved how the past and present storylines fit together so well. Like George Lucas says: it’s like poetry—it rhymes. I feel that’s what Zahn does so well: he gave us fantastic foreshadowing and parallelism in almost every chapter of book one, and he continues to deliver in this sequel.

Compared to the calm, collected, calculating Thrawn, Anakin’s whiny tendencies, hotheadedness, and brash behavior that we all associate with him were fully apparent. I preferred Thrawn with Vader, and honestly the two would be besties if Vader would just get over the whole sole loyalty to the Empire thing, pft.

I think what puts this below the previous book for me is that the change of focus from mainly Thrawn and Thrawn’s aide, to Thrawn and someone so attention-grabbing as Vader took away a bit more of the Thrawn I wanted to see. Plus, the change in pacing from several missions that showcased Thrawn’s skillset to a single mission of the present connected with a separate one of the past made this one feel a bit slow.