At long last, Kiersten White’s Star Wars: Padawan has hit physical and digital shelves in the US.
Set before The Phantom Menace and prior to Claudia Gray’s Master and Apprentice novel, Padawan follows young Obi-Wan Kenobi as he embarks on his first solo mission without his master — even though that wasn’t the original plan.
Though Padawan is White’s first full-length Star Wars novel, it is not her first story set in a galaxy far, far away. In 2020, White contributed a short story to the Star Wars anthology From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back.
The book, like its predecessor released in 2017, is a 40th anniversary celebration of the Star Wars film its stories correspond with. All 40 stories take place at some point during the events of the film, from different points of view of characters familiar and new.
White’s story, “Eyes of the Empire,” is told from the point of view of Maela, an Imperial responsible for deploying the Empire’s many probe droids throughout the larger galaxy.
And neither of these entries into the vast collection of chapters in the greater Star Wars timeline are her first nor only published works by far. In fact, Padawan, according to the author herself, is the 21st novel she has published overall.
Padawan is also the third book White has released in the past three months. Her supernatural thriller Hide released on May 24, and Wretched Waterpark, a middle-grade mystery, came out on June 7. The second book in her Sinister Summer series, Vampiric Vacation, releases this September. That’s four books in one year!
This may be the author’s first Star Wars novel, but chances are high that it won’t be her last.
Star Wars: Padawan is available now wherever books are sold.
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