I loved this play on perspectives in shared universe writing. From a Certain Point of View is evidence that there is always more to learn in creating fictional worlds, and always more characters to consider. Strong writing and imaginative directions.

I am a massive Star Wars fan so when I saw the chance to download this, I did so straight away.

And I'm so glad I did.

These stories are all by different authors, most of those we know well from other things. They follow a storyline from the attack on Hoth onwards and are mostly from characters who would be pretty minor if they ever popped up in the films. But there's also stories from Yoda, Obi-Wan and Boba Fett's points of view which is fun.

I liked how they were all connected, that characters mentioned in one story might pop up in another. And even though some of the stories were written in a completely different style to the others - there's even a one page comic strip - they all work so well together.

This is a definite must read for any and all Star Wars fans.

This concept is so enticing, but has been underwhelming both times so far. Will I read the next one? Absolutely. I still wish they were a bit more particular about which stories made the final cut. Some are just plain tedious.

Like the previous book centred on A New Hope, this is a collection of forty stories taking place in and around The Empire Strikes Back that run alongside or at right angles to the plot of the film. Also like that book, it’s a mixed bag at best. I really liked some of the stories, and strongly disliked others. Obviously there’s no way you’re going to get a consistent level of quality across forty stories, and my favourites could well be someone else’s hates and vice versa. I am slightly perturbed that my favourite stories tended to be the ones that put you in the head of an Imperial. I don’t know what that says about me, but the bottom line is that this is a fun if undemanding read, and one every Star Wars fan should get at least some enjoyment out of.

With 'From A Certain Point of View: A New Hope' firmly on my list of Star Wars books I'm really not all that keen on, 'The Empire Strikes Back' version gave me a bit of an internal debate. On the one hand, 'Empire' is and always has been my favourite of the films, it's the one I hold the rest of the films up to in terms of perfect 'Star Wars', so to get a new look at the film is something I'd look forward to, but as a follow up to one of my least favourite books in the franchise (Canon, nothing could be worse for me than 'Before the Storm', the first part of 'The Black Fleet Crisis' Trilogy') it was a tough one to settle on.
Well I needn't have worried at all.
Where a group of the authors involved with 'A New Hope' decided to inundate the book with stories about the denizens of the Cantina, which slowed the book down to no end, 'The Empire Strikes Back' doesn't suffer from this problem.
There are two major locations that we spend a lot of time in, Hoth and Cloud City, where we get stories ranging from 'Hunger', or as I refer to it, 'The Wampa's Point of View', and 'This is No Cave' that I could have happily skipped and may do in the future, and whilst I didn't enjoy them, it's not to say that they are bad stories, far from it, but just not my cup of tea.
For the most part I really engaged with this book and as a huge fan of 'The Empire Strikes Back' I love that the stories shed light on some of those secondary and tertiary characters, even the Imperial Captain who dies in a hologram to Vader gets a story, which ties into another story featuring the fan favourite Rae Sloane.
Fans of the Bounty Hunters are in luck, they all get stories, Boba has his own, as does Bossk, whilst IG-11 and Dengar are thrown together, forming a very loose partnership and another details more about 4-LOM and Zuckuss in 'STET' by Daniel José Older which also features the return of one of my favourite characters from his novel 'Last Shot'.
There are three stand-out stories for me that I would have to give 5/5, those are 'Rogue Two' by Gary Whitta, 'Rendezvous Point' by Jason Fry and Vergence by Tracy Deonn, which gives a voice (so to speak) to the Dark Side Cave on Dagobah, which as I read I could hear it in Sam Witwer's voice as 'The Brother' from 'The Clone Wars', unfortunately for me, in the audiobook Witwer narrates 'Disturbance' by Mike Chen, which is about Palpatine (for the record I didn't do the Audiobook for this one, just fan casting).
For me, this collection is a complete step-up from the 'A New Hope' version, probably because its my favourite film. For me the pacing of the book, the way the stories are arranged feels much better, they flow together and you never feel bogged down by a single location.
Whilst it's not one of the best of the current Star Wars book series it's far from the worst, it's enjoyable and as I said before, engaging. Well worth a read for fans of the franchise but not one for a newcomer to the books to start with.

I really enjoyed this book I found serveral of the stories to be instant favorites and will search out more from those authors.a must read for star wars fans

God, I wanted to like this. I absolutely love Star Wars and I was so excited for this! Anthologies just seem to be a big hit or miss for me lately, and this was mostly a miss. Some of the stories were fun, I really loved Kiersten White’s, which I’ve never read anything bad by her, I absolutely loved Delilah Dawson’s and a few others. Most of them though genuinely just dragged on and on, maybe it’s because Empire is one of my least favorite movies, but it just felt flat.

I love Star Wars. So I was super excited to read this collection of stories. Like most short story collections some of the stories worked for me while others didn’t. The stories are very mixed and I admit some of the writing styles weren’t for me. There were stories I loved, ones I felt were okay and others I was indifferent to.

The format for the arc wasn’t great, some of the stories just continue on from the last and the only divided was the last name of the author. This made it a little confusing for me at first as I didn’t realise one story had ended and another had started.

My favourites were.
Eyes of the Empire by kiersten white - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A Good Kiss by C. B. Lee ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Against All Odds by R. F. Kuang ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Dragonsnake Saves R2 by Katie Cook ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Amara Kel’s Rules for TIE Pilot Survival (Probably) by Django Wexler ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Disturbance by Mike Chen⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Lord Vader Will See You Now by John Jackson Miller ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Vergence by Tracy Deonn⭐️⭐️⭐️

3,5 stars

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK FROM A CERTAIN POINT OF VIEW is a collection of 40 stories that retells famous movie. What was really fun about this collection was that it often focused well beyond the actual story, with only a small link back. It was more like stories happening around the movie, than the movie retold. For example, only one story includes Vader's reveal, and even then only half the line.

I'd expected that most of the stories would centre around the bounty hunters and Cloud City, which a fair number did, but I wasn't expecting so many stories to be set on Hoth. I think it worked out at 20% set on Hoth. There was a massive breadth to these Hoth stories, but because the setting was the same and the general gist of where it was going (nearly all of them ended with Hoth falling), which did lead to a feeling of repetitiveness after the fifth story. Unfortunately, this meant I paid less attention to the final ones, even though they were some of the more unique ones - like Hank Green's take (naturally, it was one of the quirkier ones!)

Of the Hoth stories, I liked the kitchen boy and PR person stories best. They really focused in on the heroism of ordinary people, how they are the overlooked ones who keep the rebellion ticking with acts of valour that get overlooked. It was a really nice theme, and was a nice 'human-scale' contrast to the epic story of the saga

The Imperial tended to fall into one of two categories - either the leadership rationalising Vader's violent response, or the lower ranks struggling with dissent and often choosing rebellion. There were a few outliers (namely the two about the asteroid field, which were the best imperial stories). The TIE pilot story was so funny, with an incredible voice that had be in fits.

I think my favourite story was the one about what the rebels were doing while the movie was following Luke, Leia, and Han. It very much had a "meanwhile, back at the rebel base..." feel, and filled in that gap in the story as well as showing what life with the rebels was like for more ordinary people (OK, the non-hero pilots). The only minor comment I had was that the character the Contessa invariably reminded me of the H.I.V.E. series, and so I kept wondering why a villainous mastermind was part of the Rebel Alliance!

For the most part this is a cool book. There is about 40 little stories here. I say about because not all of them are stories and I say little because they are for the most part an average of 10 pages. There are quite a few big name authors who contributed, much like the last "From a Certain Point of View". I think any Star Wars fan will enjoy this, however there's not a lot of new or major additions to the universe. The whole book does follow the movie chronologically, as in the first story takes place around the events of the first scene of the film and so on for the entirety of the book. My one main complaint is the stories are not long enough, but that's expected when you need to get space for 40 different people.

I had thought to describe this as the literary equivalent to a covers album, or tribute set. It is a tribute, but it's not really covering the material of Empire Strikes Back, as riffing around it, and taking the characters and events we know and seeing them from previously impossible angles. It's Stan, Lee, Gus, Roy and the rest making 50 plans to gain a lover; it's a Kraftwerkian hymn to the people who built the motorways, where we had only known the joys of riding on them; it's looking over the shoulder of the music teacher of that feckin' annoying Galway Girl, or the cleaner who has to launder the bedsheets that smell like you.

If you want a response to each and every story here – covering as they do almost 600pp – you're in the wrong place, but I do need to drag this from music and back to the Empire. Our opener is a piece looking at the drudge worker who spotted drone footage of Hoth, allowing the Rebellion to be found. It would appear reading it to have too many endings, until the final kicker. The Rebellion evacuation is seen from a worker in the controls room, a lowly gay man needing self-help books to give him confidence, while all the important jobs are seemingly beyond his reach, and (less successfully) a journalist. We see nothing of Luke until the tauntaun Hal Solo rides to find him out in the snow is our focus.

As is often the case with pieces like these written to order – despite the scope of the possibilities there would always have been a purpose, a notch to fill in the plan of this book – they are never brilliant. Nor are they unreadable, however – the weaker examples we can forgive enough to not mention by name (apart from perhaps the comic strip). At the one time they are clearly canon, and at the same time something new – although only a few strike the casual fan like me as essential reading. An extended cut scene from Wedge's life feels important partly due to its length; a revisit of Luke meeting Yoda is clearly written with the hindsight of the I-III trilogy; and we love seeing what Palpatine sees when feeling the strong disturbance in the Force, and into the mind also of the creature behind the "This is no cave!" exclamation. Towards the end we get someone's hand surgeon, if that's not too much of a spoiler.

I think I'm fighting a tide with this book, though, for it is clearly inferior to the one for A New Hope, in much the same ways Empire was always the less interesting film. (Don't worry, the world is wrong about only even numbers of Star Trek films being any good, too.) I love the fact this is going to be a huge fillup to some N American education and literacy charities, but much more importantly, this was not as good as the first book of its ilk. I was surprised to read towards the end that there were only forty stories in here (one for every year since the film it honours came out) – it certainly reads like more, and not in a good way. It's almost 20 per cent longer than the first book, and boy does it feel like it.

Star Wars fans can rejoice as another volume of short stories based on our favourite franchise is upon us. It’s 40 years since The Empire Strikes Back made a monumental impact on our lives. These 40 stories are a celebration of the characters that we adore and it gives life to the ones that linger in the background of events in our cherished heroes & villains adventure.

I enjoyed the first volume which focused on Star Wars however I truly loved this sequel. I thought the stories were stronger and more satisfying. The quality of the writing was very high, and they covered a range of emotions from both the Rebel and the Imperial side and even some Wampa’s.

The artwork on the cover with Yoda on Dagobah was an excellent choice as it looks fantastic and is very eye-catching for displaying in book shops. I also really liked the small monochrome illustrations which were like a stamp at the beginning of each story.

I really hope the publishers continue with a collection for Return of the Jedi, to complete the set.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review! 4.5 out of 5 stars.

I must confess: my knowledge of Star Wars is limited to the new trilogy (though I haven't seen the third), pop culture, TVtropes searches from a few years back, distant memories of sleeping through the first prequel movie, and Padmé/Sabé fanfiction. I have never watched the Empire Strikes Back, though I know the broad strokes of it through gifs and everyone telling me about it. I was excited to read this book as many writers I was excited about had written in it. Much to my delight, I discovered new writers I'll be checking out!
I appreciated a lot that most of these stories followed a rough chronological order, and references in-story were able to help readers judge where each short story fell in regards to others. To my surprise I was also dimly able to recognize where they fell matched up to the movie: this, surely is to the talent of the various authors and certainly not on me. In the space of a handful of pages, each made their settings quite clear.
The short stories I enjoyed the most were, in the order they appeared: "Eyes of the Empire" by Kiersten White,
"Hunger"by Mark Oshiro, "A Good Kiss" by C.B. Lee, "She Will Keep Them Warm" by Delilah S. Dawson, "Against All Odds" by R.F. Kuang, "A Naturalist on Hoth" by Hank Green (this to my surprise), "The Final Order" by Seth Dickinson, "Amara Kel's Rules for TIE Pilot Survival (Probably)" by Django Wexlerand, and "But What Does He Eat?" by S.A. Chakraborty.
The short stories were varied in their subjects, who were both humans, humanoids, animals, droids, and locations. While short, the authors were able to give great characterization and expansion in just a handful of pages, creating memorable characters in the Star Wars canon.

With thanks to Netgalley and Random house for allowing me to review this book.

From a Certain Point of view is a brilliant collection of 40 short stories that celebrates the 40th anniversary of Empire strikes back.

Some of the short stories are sad, happy, fun, From Luke Skywalker to a wampa's tale..(tail)

This collection of short stories is a brilliant Christmas present for any die hard star wars fan. I know I will be giving one or two copies as gifts.

This is such a fun anthology to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back! This is essentially forty different stories retelling the events of the movie, told by different authors, and all from the point of view of a wide array of characters-- from those we know such as Wedge and Dak to those we may not have even given a second thought to such as the wampa and tauntaun. The latter stories are what interested me the most. I thought it was so cool to read from the point of view of some of the creatures, and I didn't think I'd be so moved from the inner thoughts of a tauntaun! You get a nice mix of POVs from both the Rebellion and the Empire, so you can get a feel for how it is on both sides. As with most anthology collections, there were some stories I favored over others, but even the ones I didn't love as much were still fun. This is definitely one to pick up if you're a Star Wars fan.

I received a copy of this book from Century and Netgalley.

This book is such a treat! 40 stories celebrating 40 voices that you may not have thought much about while watching Empire!

The stories run the gamut of all emotions and it is a delightful experience to read!