#nerdyreview

This book is a lot of firsts for this blog: my first nonfiction book to review and the first book in a while that I haven’t immediately chewed through in less than a week. To back up for a minute, I have had some anxiety issues for most of my life, and late last year I was (finally) diagnosed with a mild form of OCD. Almost immediately my geeky boyfriend bought me this book, mostly due to his obsession with Marisha Ray of Critical Role fame (I’m kidding, he wanted to make me feel better but it also had to do with Marisha).

I sat down with it right away, thinking I’d be done with it very quickly, fooled by the colorful cover and wide typeface. In actuality, this book tackles mental health issues in an interesting way - not head-on, but sideways by discussing them through the lens of our favorite geeky female characters (such as She-Hulk, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Black Widow. These stories are also interspersed with interviews with mental health professionals and female creators where the discuss their own mental health struggles.

For the most part, I enjoyed the stories themselves, even if I thought the analysis could be deeper and last a few more pages per character. I appreciated the variety of characters and by extension the variety of mental illnesses and traumas the book addresses, even if keeping it short means that each character only gets a few pages. The stories DID help me in some small way with my diagnosis and through the early days of my therapy. The sleeper subject here is the interviews, which are mesmerizing on their own. I wanted them to be so much longer!

Of all the sci-fi novels I get the pleasure of reading, Star Wars novels are my absolute favorite, and this novel is a fine addition to the Disney Star Wars canon. Phasma tells the backstory of our favorite First Order captain, and fleshes out the character (and the First Order as a whole) in a much-needed way. 

This story is told through a Resistance spy passing along her intelligence to a mysterious enemy of Phasma, and begins with the captain’s early life on a planet that is dying for unknown reasons. She and her band of warriors lead a rough hunter-gatherer nomadic existence, which is disrupted when Brendol Hux crash lands on the system. Phasma learns he is looking for the fiercest warriors in the galaxy to join the First Order, and she decides her best chance to get off-planet is to prove she’s the genuine article.  

Overall, the world building in this novel is incredible, and I could tell Dawson had taken great care to make her new planet feel spacious. Parnassos comes complete with a few separate cultures and many different terrains, and I felt the tedium of Brendol and Phasma’s travels in a way I wouldn’t normally in a sci-fi novel. As a warning however, it takes a lot of pages to build a world this size, and so this novel feels longer than normal Star Wars books.

Additionally, Phasma herself feels as though she has more agency in this story than the movies. We all know she can be incredibly intimidating in the films, but is underutilized in my opinion. This story made her both deadly and sympathetic, which I found impressive considering the level of pain she inflicts on many other characters. It’s also important to note that beyond the captain herself, there are many other fearsome female warriors that take center stage in this story, which I appreciated.