A review by studiomikarts
Life Day Treasury: Holiday Stories From a Galaxy Far, Far Away by George Mann

hopeful inspiring lighthearted mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot

3.0

Another solid, middle-of-the-road, three-star book for me. The year-end holiday theme helped bolster it, but there were a lot of issues that kept me from giving it a better rating. The illustrations were nice. I found their concept-art-quality interesting. They also helped with visualizing the characters in each of the stories, which was a big problem with the text. I was constantly on my phone, googling names of characters, species, locations, vehicles, etc. because the writing did not, for the most part, describe many of these things outside a mention of their proper names. I LOVE Star Wars, but I felt excluded by the way this book assumed I'd be a religiously devout fan, like a living Wookiepedia (the site I was constantly visiting while I read) without the need for help in imagining the characters and things. Even with the illustrations, the one per story rarely gave enough visual material to cover everything. It's almost as if the proper names of Star Wars specific things were chosen in lieu of more creative descriptions because it saved space. I say this because another complaint is that I found most of the stories to be rather rushed, especially in the conclusions. I think the authors tried to pack too much content into too small a word count.

Still, I found several stories charming (my favorite was the The Spirit of Life Day, a cool ghost story~) and it was an easy, quick read, so that even with my complaints, I didn't feel like my time was wasted. I actually wouldn't mind reading this book again next holiday season. It's definitely worth keeping in my holiday collection even just for show. The paper quality is a bit low, but it has fancy deckled edges and good cover design & construction. For someone who loves the year-end holidays and Star Wars, it's not a bad book!
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