I'm now officially only one book away from catching up on The High Republic Phase III! Last week I read Zoraida Córdova's Beware the Nameless, and I completely adored it! It reunited us with some of the characters from Escape from Valo while also introducing some new ones on a challenging adventure. I enjoyed the explorations of what it means to help others in a galaxy so selfish, and the importance of having compassion when things are unfair. This was a great book for readers of all ages and it fits very nicely into the mysteries in this chapter of storytelling.
Spoilers ahead for Beware the Nameless by Zoraida Córdova!
I mostly want to focus on the new characters in this book, my personal favorite easily being Churo the Hutt. Churo is a young Hutt who's family is involved in some very very legitimate business, as Hutts are, but he has no interest in it, or any kind of violence or crime. Churo loves to study plants and bugs, he has a greenhouse where he reads and keeps his terrariums. He's made to go on a mission with his sister against the Nihil, where he steals a Nameless egg, but he ends up crash landing on the same planet as the Jedi side-mission in the book. He makes his first friends in the book, and learns what it is to not just have friends, but to be one. I loved Churo's arc in this book, and how even though he has a tendency to be scared and nervous, he's still able to be brave and figure out the right thing to do. Even though Churo messes up sometimes, his friends still love him. At the very end of the book he is cast out from his Hutt family, but he's able to make his own family through his friends, and find his own place in the galaxy where he doesn't have to be what everyone thinks a Hutt should be, but he gets to be himself.
My other favorite character was Zenny Greylark. Yep, that's right, in relation to THOSE Greylarks from Phase II (did Axel have kids? who did he have kids with? So many questions!). I loved Zenny. She's a young girl who's family is heavily involved in doing good for the galaxy. Her mother is a senator, her father and sister are both in the Republic Defense Coalition. However, both her sister and father went missing in the Occlusion Zone, leaving Zenny and her mother desperate. Zenny sneaks aboard the ship leaving on a Republic mission, and when a mysterious distress signal gets picked up, she begs to investigate it, bringing the Jedi younglings, one Jedi master and an RDC captain. The distress signal turns out to be Churo's, not her sister's, but Zenny holds out hope anyway. Zenny learns important lessons about not judging others, trusting others, and bravery as she faces Nameless and Nihil alike. By the end of the book, she's finally reunited with her sister and it's incredibly touching, and hope we get to see more of these later generations of the Greylark family in the future- including finding Papa Greylark!
Our other new main character is Jamil, a Jedi youngling. Like Zenny, Jamil sneaks aboard the mission, though by mistake. His friend Tep Tep, from Escape from Valo, is napping aboard the ship and he was seeking her out to talk to her. He meets Kildo, and they're talking when the ship takes off. The RDC personnel and Jedi onboard are worried about the safety of the gaggle of children that have found themselves on this mission, so they approve Zenny's desire to take a small shuttle and search for her sister, assuming they would be safer (an assumption that would turn out to be very false). Jamil experiences a lot of self doubt. He's insecure because he didn't get selected to be a padawan like some of his peers did, as well as because some of his fellow younglings (including Kildo and Tep Tep) have had adventures of their own and faced danger, something he has no experience with. Jamil is challenged a lot in this book, especially when the Jedi Master accompanying the kids is killed by the Nameless, but ultimately Jamil perserveres and becomes more confident in himself. But that confidence comes with self-awareness. At the end of the book, the Jedi Council offers Jamil the opportunity to become a padawan a bit early like some others, but he declines, aware of the fact that he still has much to learn about the Force before he's ready for that big step.
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