With the soon to be released and much anticipated Star Wars film, there is a noticeable rise in SW memorabilia. DK, known for their large and relatively cheap tie-in books have not been slow to jump on the bandwagon.

Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know - Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens (200 pages), apart from being a ridiculously long title is also a large, heavy beast of a book. A lot of the DK books are produced for the young adult market, and this is no exception. So, it’s not going to provide you with any socioeconomic details of the films, but what it will do is present colourful double page spreads, laced with tidbits from both the fictional world of the films as well as a few salient bits of information from the making of the films.

This book goes further than most by accepting both the old and the new animated shows as canon, so it was nice to see entries on both Ahsoka and Ezra. The book is broken down into five chapters. Protectors of the Galaxy covers the Jedi and rebels. Each character, or in the case of the Wookies gets a two page spread.

The spreads consist of various shots from whichever film or show the character appeared in and for some characters this involves a mixture from both film and animation. Most of the information is fictional and related to Lucas’s world building, although each section also contains a roundel with a little piece of factual information. It is fair to say that the information provided is trivia, hopefully something you may have missed or not realised from the films.

Having done a whistle stop tour of the good guys, it’s no surprise that Bad Guys, Bounty Hunters and the Underworld, deal with the various forms of evil in the galaxy. But of course the Star Wars universe consists of so much more than the good and bad guys, so Weird and Wonderful Beings takes a look at all the other intelligent and non-intelligent species.

The last major section, In a Galaxy Far Away..., covers everything else, including planets, cities and ships. Lastly we have a few pages devoted to the new film with a nice two page painting of Rey and BB-8, one for the First Order Stormtroopers and one for Kylo Ren. You may think that this is not a lot, but, if you carefully scour the book, references or illustrations from the new film occasionally appear.

Given its target audience, it’s not bad as a primer for the new film and a nice way of catching up on stuff you may have forgotten. The book sports a sturdy cardboard cover and, internally, is printed on good quality paper with a silk finish.

8

Charles Packer