A review by toggle_fow
Lesser Evil by Timothy Zahn

adventurous medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Three stars for the main story.

This is the final reveal of the true story behind Thrawn's mysterious and multi-faceted past: exile, missing sister, vague connection to the skywalker program, mission to the Empire, EVERYTHING. And for all that, it's really very... dull.

TEN stars for the THRASS FLASHBACKS. AHH.

So, we return to all of our familiar problems:

1. The Grysk threat
2. The fractured nature of Chiss politics
3. Lots of people hate Thrawn

Do we fix any of them? Yes. One out of three gets mostly-successfully fixed, and I'm sure you can guess which.

The main story is a tale of Thrawn and his allies racing around the galaxy mostly doing politics and random subplots that are all advancing the goal of figuring out Jixus the Grysk's evil master plan. But they all feel disjointed and chaotic. I had trouble following the minutiae, and what's worse, I had trouble CARING enough to TRY to follow it.

The final battle is neat, and pleasingly dramatic.

The denouement is... not. Like, we all know how this is going to end. And we all know the understated, relatively flat and subdued Zahn writing style. But this is Thrawn's EXILE. I cannot help but wish it felt more emotionally devastating and less underwhelming.

There is a part where Thrawn says, "I don't expect to be gone from the Ascendancy more than a few months" that made me ugly laugh. And it seems like this is HINTING he might make it back home someday, which??? Ahsoka TV show please come through for me.

But overall, Thrawn's transgression is not astounding. He barely, barely broke the preemptive strike rule. Like, he definitely broke the spirit of the rule but he honestly may not have even broken the letter of it. Which is what he's been doing every single minute of every day this whole time. There was nothing particularly egregious about this time, except the more public nature of it.

This is definitely not the dramatic icarus-like fall from grace that Thurfian has been foretelling. I think that was actually Lothal.

It just feels a bit like a letdown, after all this buildup. I honestly wish Thrawn HAD truly done something wild and ruthless, or made some kind of a mistake.

Now that we've dealt with the main story, we can move on to the good part. This book has THRASS FLASHBACKS. These did not start out particularly impressively. Honestly, I was disappointed. Thrass didn't seem to be characterized particularly well, or mesh with what I remember from Outbound Flight. It didn't seem like any of it mattered, and I was already bored by the main story.

However, there were greater things to come:

• Thrass and Thrawn are NOT in fact blood related. I had always pictured them as born brothers for some reason, but they were strangers at first and only connected by the Mitth family tie. I wasn't hype for this dynamic at first, but it did end up paying off.

• Thrass and Thrawn on coffee and board game dates.

• Political schemes and machinations engineered by family bigwigs for the SOLE purpose of forcing Thrass to publicly admit that he likes Thrawn.

• In these flashbacks, Thrawn is pretty much as vulnerable as he is ever shown to be. He is not as confident. There's a whole big point made of how MUCH he wants someone to engage with him in his Sherlock Holmes deduction games, and no one will. Sorry Thrawn, you're going to have to adopt a few humans first.

• Scene where Thrass dramatically calls Thrawn his BROTHER as part of a negotiation with an enemy. I shrieked internally, and clearly so did Thrawn. You guys, I LOVED THIS SCENE. This scene lives rent free in my mind, and is the only thing that comes close to justifying this book's existence.

• Follow-up scene where Thrawn awkwardly is like "So, ummm... did you mean it." IT'S SO GOOD.

• Thrass's final moments scene is literally just dropped into the book without any context. If anyone is reading this and hasn't read Outbound Flight first, this little moment will seem absolutely random, poorly constructed, and apropos of nothing. I went back to compare it with the actual scene from Outbound Flight and it's exactly the same with dialogue reproduced verbatim, just with a bit more of Thrass's mental perspective.

Frankly this book is nothing but a sourdough starter, and the sourdough is fanfiction.