From Publishers Weekly
While this is easily the best of a bestselling series (the five earlier books all made the New York Times bestseller list), its flaws are still obvious. The problem rises from the Star Wars film tradition in which banter was stronger than logic, an arrangement that suffers in print. Leia, former princess, now Chief of State of the New Republic, attempts to rescue her children, who have been kidnapped by Lord Hethrir, leader of the evil organization, the Empire Reborn. Coincidence piles upon improbability at warp speed as scenes shift from Leia to the children to Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, who have left on vacation with See-Threepio. At Crseih Station, located in a system with a double star, one of which is a black hole, the threesome encounter a mysterious being called Waru and the even more enigmatic Xaverri. McIntyre (Transition) draws her characters with skill, especially Han and Leia's daughter Jaina, but she weaves a plot full of holes, suggesting that the world she writes of may be alien to her in more ways than one.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The abduction of her children sends Princess Leia across the galaxy in pursuit of the kidnappers, unaware that her search will coincide with Han and Luke's attempts to uncover a rumored enclave of Jedi Knights on the fringes of former imperial territory. This latest addition to the popular Star Wars series adds a new dimension to the lives of its heroes as the children of Leia and Han Solo, who refuse to remain passive victims, embark on an adventure of their own. The author of Dreamsnake (Dell, 1986) and the "Starfarers" series captures the feel of the Star Wars universe in this fast-paced sf adventure. McIntyre's talent and the popularity of the subject make this essential for libraries.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
With several Star Trek novels to her credit, award-winning sf veteran McIntyre ventures into the ever-popular Star Wars territory, lending a hard-science veneer to familiar themes and characters by introducing a space-bending, crystalline star. While touring the outer worlds of the New Republic, Leia and Han's children are kidnapped and taken to a remote planet by power-mad Empire loyalist Lord Hethrir. Bent on retrieving them and with a badly injured Chewbacca and the always resourceful Artoo-Detoo joining her, Leia follows a winding, hyperspace trail to an outpost of enslaved children. Meanwhile, unaware of the abduction, Han, Luke, and See-Threepio investigate rumors of lost Jedi knights by voyaging to Crseih Station, where a nearby black hole and an orbiting crystal star put them in constant mortal danger. There Leia's and Han's paths intersect in a struggle to rescue their children, uncover the source of the Jedi rumors, and stop Lord Hethrir before he gains enough power to usher in an Empire Reborn. McIntyre neatly weaves together gripping, edge-of-your-seat action with intriguing, original plot developments and characters that notably include an enigmatic, Force-guided creature named Waru. Star Wars fans will certainly enjoy the book, but McIntyre's superlative storytelling gives it much broader appeal. Carl Hays
Review
Vonda McIntyre is an award winning author of science fiction and fantasy. She brings her own unique talents to the Star Wars universe by continuing and expanding the Star Wars tradition with Star Wars: The Crystal Star. As Princess Leia and Chewbacca follow a trail of treachery across space and Luke Skywalker and Han Solo draw closer to the truth behind a sinister cult, the moment nears for an explosive showdown that could determine the fate of the entire universe. Performed by Anthony Heald, Star Wars: The Crystal Star comes complete with the original Star Wars music and splendid sound effects. -- Midwest Book Review
From the Publisher
The New York Times Bestseller
Praise for previous Star Wars adventures:
Heir to the Empire:
"Chock full of all the good stuff you've come to expect from a battle of good against evil."
--Daily News, New York
Dark Force Rising:
"Zahn has perfectly captured the pace and flavor of the Star Wars movies. This is space opera at its best."
--Sunday Oklahoman
From the Inside Flap
y Zahn reopened the door to George Lucas's dazzling universe with his New York Times-bestselling Star Wars trilogy. Then Kathy Tyers's The Truce at Bakura took readers back to the fateful days following the events in Return of the Jedi. And with The Courtship of Princess Leia Dave Wolverton chronicled Han Solo's turbulent campaign for the princess's hand. Now, award-winning author Vonda N. McIntyre continues the tradition as the ultimate space adventure unfolds in The Crystal Star.
Princess Leia is dealt a crushing blow when her three children--Anakin and the twins Jaina and Jacen--are kidnapped. Leia's advisers counsel her to wait for a ransom note, but waiting is the hardest thing for a mother to do when her children are in danger--and worse than waiting is her discovery that she cannot sense her children through the Force.
Ultimately, the princess has n
About the Author
Vonda McIntyre is the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning science fiction author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The Crystal Star. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The children had been kidnapped.
Leia ran headlong toward the glade, leaving behind the courtiers and the chamberlain of Munto Codru, leaving her attendants, leaving the young page who—completely against protocol—had stumbled into Leia’s receiving room, bleeding from nose and ears, incoherent.
But Leia understood her: Jaina and Jacen and Anakin had been stolen.
Leia ran, now, through the trees and down a soft mossy path that led into her children’s playground. Jaina imagined the path was a starship course, set to hyperspace. Jacen pretended it was a great mysterious road, a river. Anakin, going through a literal phase, insisted that it was only a path through the forest to the meadow.
The children loved the forest and the meadow, and Leia loved exclaiming in wonder at the treasures they brought her: a squirmy bug, a stone with shiny bits trapped in its matrix—rare jewels, perhaps!—or the fragments of an eggshell.
Her vision blurred with tears. Her soft slipper snared in the tangled moss. She stumbled, caught herself, and plunged onward, holding the skirts of her court robe high.
In the old days, she thought, in the old days, I’d be wearing boots and trousers, I wouldn’t be hampered and tripped by my own clothing!
Her breath burned in her throat.
And I’d be able to run from my receiving room to the forest glade without losing my breath!
The green afternoon light shifted and fluttered around her. Before her, the light brightened where the forest opened into a water-meadow, the meadow where her children had been playing.
Leia ran toward it, gasping, her legs heavy.
She was running toward an absence, not a presence, toward a terrible void.
She cried out to herself, How could this happen? How is this possible?
The answer—the only way it could be possible—terrified her. For a short time, her ability to sense the presence of her children had been neutralized. Only a manipulation of the Force could have such an effect.
Leia reached the meadow. She ran toward the creek where Jaina and Jacen had splashed and played and taught little Anakin to swim.
A crater was ripped into the soft grass. The leafy blades had been flattened into a circle around the raw patch of empty dirt.
A pressure bomb! Leia thought in horror.
A pressure bomb had gone off, near her children.
They aren’t dead! she told herself. They can’t be, I’d know if they were dead!
At the edge of the blast area, Chewbacca lay sprawled in a heap. Blood flowed bright against his chestnut coat.
Leia fell to her knees beside him, oblivious to the mud. She feared he was dead—but he was still bleeding, still breathing. She pressed her hand against the deep gash in his leg, desperate to stop the flow of blood and save his life. His powerful pulse drove the blood from his body. Like the page, he also bled from ears and nostrils.
A dreadful, grieving, keening sound escaped him, not a groan of pain but a cry of rage and remorse.
“Lie still!” Leia said. “Chewbacca, lie still! The doctor is coming, you’ll be all right, what happened, oh, what happened?”
He cried out again, and Leia understood that he felt such despair that he wanted to die. He had adopted her family as his own, his Honor Family, and he had failed to protect the children.
“You can’t die!” He must live, she thought. He must. Only he can tell me who stole my children. “Come back! Come back to me!”
Her aides and the chamberlain hurried out of the forest, trampling the delicate high grass, exclaiming in outrage when the slender blades cut them. Leia’s children had wandered the meadow at liberty, neither leaving footprints nor receiving any harm. The grass parted before them like magic.
Magic, for my magic children, Leia thought. I thought I had protected them, I thought they could never come to any harm.
Hot tears ran down her cheeks.
The courtiers and advisers and guards gathered around her.
“Madam, madam,” said the chamberlain of Munto Codru. Out here in the wild sun and the wind, Mr. Iyon’s face was flushed and he looked uncomfortable.
“Did you bring the doctor?” Leia cried. “Get the doctor!”
“I sent for her, madam.”
Mr. Iyon tried to make her get up, tried to take over staunching the flow of blood from Chewbacca’s wound, but she pushed him away with a sharp word. Chewbacca’s pulse faltered. Leia feared he was failing.
You will not die, she thought. You must not die. I won’t let you die!
She drew on her inadequate knowledge to strengthen him. She bitterly regretted the responsibilities of statecraft that had prevented her from being properly trained in the ways of the Force.
Leia knew that if she allowed Chewbacca’s hot blood to gush past her hands, his life, too, would stream away.
The doctor ran across the field. Her wyrwulf loped behind her, carrying her equipment and supplies. The doctor’s wyrwulf reminded her that Mr. Iyon’s wyrwulf had been playing with her children.
It had disappeared as well.
Dr. Hyos knelt beside Leia. She observed Chewbacca’s wound and Leia’s first aid with a glance. “Ah,” she said briskly. “Good work.”
“Come away, now, Princess,” the chamberlain said.
“Not yet!” Dr. Hyos exclaimed. “I have only four hands, after all. The princess is quite all right where she is.”
The wyrwulf sat on its haunches between Leia and Dr. Hyos. Leia shuddered. The wyrwulf turned its massive head, slowly, gently, staring at her with great limpid liquid blue eyes. Its coat was thick and brown, with long coarse black guard hairs.
The doctor’s wyrwulf panted and slavered, its tongue lolling over its pitted fangs. Its face was grotesque. Its hot bitter breath made Leia flinch.
Dr. Hyos’s four hands, so languid at rest, moved quickly over the panniers strapped to the wyrwulf’s sides.
“Do you see what I am doing, my dear?” she said softly. “The bleeding is most important. Our princess has stopped it.”
The doctor spoke to the wyrwulf, explaining everything she did.
Dr. Hyos drew pressure bandages from one compartment as she chose the proper medicine from another. Always, she told the wyrwulf what she was doing. Her long gold fingers were deft and sure.
Leia allowed herself a moment of hope, even with her hands covered with Chewbacca’s hot blood. He had closed his eyes; he had stopped moving.
“As the bandage seals itself, my princess,” Dr. Hyos said, “move your hand from the wound.”
Leia obeyed. Dr. Hyos pressed the bandage to Chewbacca’s flank. The bandage pressed itself against Leia’s hand, clasped itself to Chewbacca, and wound its connectors through his fur. The wyrwulf watched, its tongue lolling.
Leia sat back on her heels. Her hands were sticky and her robes were smeared and she viewed everything in the clarity of horrified belief.
Dr. Hyos examined Chewbacca, frowning over the drying streaks of blood that had trickled from his nose and ears.
“Pressure bomb …” she said.
Leia remembered, as if from a distant dream, the sound of a single clap of thunder. She had thought—her thoughts had been so slow—that the morning must have turned from fair to rain; she had thought, fondly, that Chewbacca would soon bring the twins and Anakin in from the meadow. She could take a moment from her duties to cuddle them, to admire their newest treasures, to see that they had their lunch.
Now it was mid-afternoon. How could it be so late in the day, when such a short time ago it had not yet been lunchtime?
“Madam—” Chamberlain Iyon said. But he did not try again to make Leia come away.
“Close the port,” Leia said. “Block the roads. Can the page be questioned? Check the port controller—is there any chance the kidnappers have left the planet?”
As she spoke, she feared any measures she might take would be useless, and if not useless, too late.
But if they’ve fled, she thought, I could chase them in Alderaan. I could catch them, my little ship can catch anything—
“Madam, closing the port would not be wise.”
She glared at him, instantly suspicious of a man she had trusted only a moment before.
“They took your—” She hesitated, unsure what to say.
“My wyrwulf, madam,” he said. “Yes.”
“Your wyrwulf. Don’t you care?”
“I care very much, madam. And I understand our traditions, which you—I beg your pardon—do not. Closing the spaceport is unnecessary.”
“The kidnappers will try to escape Munto Codru,” she said.
Mr. Iyon spread his four hands.
“They will not. There are traditions,” he said. “If we follow them, nothing will happen to the children—that too is the tradition.”
Leia knew of Munto Codru’s traditions of abduction and ransom. That was why Chewbacca had been staying so close to the children. That was why extra security surrounded and guarded the ancient castle. For the people of Munto Codru, coup abduction was an important and traditional political sport.
It was a sport in which Leia did not care to participate.
“It’s a most audacious abduction,” the chamberlain said.
“And a cruel one!” Leia said. “Chewbacca is wounded! And the pressure bomb—my children—” She fought for control of her voice and of her fear.
“The coup-counters detonated a pressure bomb only to prove that they could, madam,” Mr. Iyon said.
“But no one is supposed to be injured, during your coup abductions!”
“No one of noble birth, Princess Leia,” he said.
“My title is ‘Chief of State,’ sir,” she said angrily. “Not ‘Princess.’ Not any longer. The world where I was a princess is long destroyed. We live in a Republic, now.”
“I know it, madam. Please forgive our old-fashioned ways.”
“They must know they haven’t a hope,” Leia said. “Of receiving a ransom, of escape. And if they should …” She could not bring herself to say the word harm.
“Please allow me to advise you in this matter,” the chamberlain said. He leaned toward her, intense. “If you apply the rules of the Republic, disaster—tragedy—will be the result.”
“The ransomers,” Dr. Hyos said, with every evidence of approval, “must be very brave. But young and inexperienced as well. The family … which would it be?” She glanced at Mr. Iyon. “The Sibiu, perhaps?”
“They have insufficient resources,” the chamberlain said.
Whoever it was, Leia thought, needed only the resources of the Force. The dark side of the Force.
Mr. Iyon gestured to the broken ground, to Chewbacca. “This required a skiff, a tractor beam. Connections with arms smugglers, to obtain the pressure bomb.”
“Ah. The Temebiu, then.”
“It could be,” the chamberlain said. “They are ambitious.”
“I’ll show them ambition,” Leia muttered.
“Madam, please. Your children will not be harmed—cannot be harmed, for the ransomers to achieve their goals. They may look upon the event as a great adventure—”
“Our friend Chewbacca has been wounded nearly to death!” Leia cried. “My children will not find that amusing. Nor do I!”
“It is a shame,” the chamberlain said. “Perhaps he did not comprehend the information on our traditions? He was meant to surrender.”
“Close the port,” Leia said again, her voice tight. She was too angry to respond to the chamberlain’s comment. “I won’t take any chances that they’ll leave Munto Codru.”
“Very well,” Mr. Iyon said. “It is possible … but we must do it carefully. We must do it … in a way to amuse rather than offend …” His voice trailed off thoughtfully.
Dr. Hyos checked Chewbacca’s pulse at the large vein the wound had come so close to piercing. “Stable. There. Good. To the surgery with you.”
Chewbacca, barely conscious, gazed at Leia with uncomprehending eyes.
“Battlefield medicine,” Dr. Hyos said. “Haven’t done any in a long time. Didn’t think I’d ever have to see a battlefield again.”
“Neither did I,” Leia said.
The wyrwulf howled.
In The Crystal Star, Leia's three children are kidnapped, and she goes to find them with the help of Chewbacca and R2-D2. Hans and Luke are on a mission to save the planet Creseih. Anthony Heald, the consummate reader, does an excellent rendition of this modern classic. His abilities elevate him above all others. Reproducing the character voices with great effectiveness, his voice, enhanced by sound effects, keeps the listener riveted. This action-filled, well-paced performance is worth listening to over and over. M.E.M. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Audible Audiobook
– Abridged
