Book Review: Vernestra Rwoh and Indara Team Up in "Star Wars: The Acolyte - Wayseeker" Prequel to the Disney+ Series
Two weeks from now, Random House Worlds will release the new novel Star Wars: The Acolyte - Wayseeker by author Justina Ireland (Star Wars: Spark of the Resistance). Laughing Place was provided with an advance digital copy of the book, and below are my mostly spoiler-free thoughts.
The Acolyte - Wayseeker was announced at San Diego Comic-Con last year, before we knew what the fate of The Acolyte series would be on Disney+. And now that we know Lucasfilm’s live-action show set a century before the Star Wars movies won’t be returning for a second season, it’s a little bittersweet to pick up a book providing backstory for some of its characters. But I will say that ultimately I’m glad Wayseeker exists, if only to serve as something of a point of connection between The Acolyte and the Star Wars: The High Republic multi-platform initiative that precedes it in the larger timeline. This novel zooms in on two characters in particular: Vernestra Rwoh, who was created by Justina Ireland for The High Republic and later popped up in The Acolyte as well (played by actress Rebecca Henderson) and Indara (Carrie-Ann Moss’s gone-too-soon Jedi Master). Those two don’t actually interact on-screen in The Acolyte, but there is an indication that they knew each other, and here we get the story of what first brought them together.
As the narrative of Wayseeker begins, Vernestra is off bringing light to the galaxy as the titular type of Jedi who largely operates independently of the Jedi Council on Coruscant. But an alarming turn of events spurs the Council to recall Rwoh to the center of the galaxy, and when she doesn’t respond it’s up to Indara (who is quite a bit younger and less sure of herself in this book than how we saw her in The Acolyte) to go and fetch her. Much like how parts of The Acolyte played like a police procedural in A Galaxy Far, Far Away, a lot of Wayseeker feels like a buddy-cop road movie, with these two Jedi at vastly different points in their careers (Vernestra is a century-old Jedi Master, while Indara has only recently been promoted from Padawan into full-fledged Jedi Knight) not really getting along at first, Odd Couple-style, and then gradually learning to respect and work with each other over the course of the story. And what is the story, you may ask? Well, I don’t want to spoil too much, but it does involve a secret device being developed and distributed by an underground pirate ring that our two heroes must investigate and eliminate before its threat to the Jedi and the galaxy grows larger.
You’re probably also wondering whether any other characters from The High Republic or The Acolyte show up, and I will actually spoil that by saying “yes"-- though I’m not going to tell you which ones. You’ll have to read it to find out, and I suspect most fans of the show will want to do that anyway. That brings me to what really makes me happy about The Acolyte - Wayseeker (I thought it was fine as a novel in and of itself– nothing superlative, but entertaining enough to be worth your time)-- I think it stands a good chance of getting The Acolyte fans to dive further back into The High Republic, which also happens to be wrapping up this summer with its final novels and comic books of Phase III. Wayseeker is a character study of two Jedi– interestingly written from a first-person perspective during the chapters focused on Vernestra and in the third-person during the Indara chapters– whose paths may have crossed because the Force chose to bring them together to solve this case. Vern’s personality evolves a lot in the chronological gap between the two above-listed projects, and here Ireland does a commendable job in giving us a big piece of the puzzle as to why. To fill in the rest, Star Wars aficionados are (hopefully) going to want to complete their High Republic reading, and maybe even revisit The Acolyte once again. And hopefully Wayseeker will be successful enough that Lucasfilm Publishing will continue to flesh out this time period, or even give The Acolyte the proper conclusion it couldn’t reach on Disney+.
Star Wars: The Acolyte - Wayseeker will be released on Tuesday, May 6th wherever books are sold, but is available for pre-order right now.