Tahiri Veila

Tragedy is no stranger to the characters in Star Wars. Think about it—Anakin fell to the dark side in an attempt to save the one he loved. Padmé’s death came at the hand of her husband. Luke and Leia were left as orphan infants. Luke took up the hero’s journey when he witnessed his aunt and uncle’s corpses smoldering outside of his childhood home. 

You get the picture. There isn’t an abundance of happily-ever-afters in the galaxy far, far away. That’s certainly the case with Tahiri Veila.

Tahiri is many things. A Tatooinian. Anakin Solo’s childhood best friend. Barefoot warrior half-alien Tusken Raider Jedi. Broken-hearted lover. Sith apprentice. Addict. Tool in multiple galactic wars. And that barely scratches the surface of her story. 

Few characters in Star Wars are as easy to empathize with nor are as frustrating to us as readers rooting for her. And yet every misstep and every tragedy is believable, well-written, and utterly heartbreaking. Despite the hurt and frustration, her journey is well worth the investment. 

In this collection you’ll find multiple lengthy Legends series: Junior Jedi Knights, the New Jedi Order, the Dark Nest Trilogy, Legacy of the Force, and Fate of the Jedi. 

Junior Jedi Knights from Rebecca Moesta and Nancy Richardson is Tahiri’s light-hearted origin in which she trains alongside Anakin Solo at Luke Skywalker’s Jedi academy on Yavin IV. Compared to the Young Jedi Knights series, Junior Jedi Knights is much shorter. 

From there, Tahiri was absent from the first six books of the New Jedi Order series, making her adult-novel debut in Greg Keyes’s Edge of Victory I: Conquest. It, alongside Star by Star, is the most important book in the series for Tahiri. Therein, Anakin Solo embarked on a rogue rescue mission to save the students at the Jedi academy on Yavin IV from the Yuuzhan Vong. Her experiences at the hands of the Vong in Conquest changed her irrevocably. 

After her brainwashing and Anakin’s attempts to rescue her, there was a part of Tahiri that became part Yuuzhan Vong and would never be the same. This was a crucial development in the New Jedi Order as we now had a sympathetic character who both resented and identified with the Yuuzhan Vong and gave both the Jedi and the reader insight into their culture and their thinking. 

Her story pivoted drastically once again in Legacy of the Force as she is taken in under the wing of Darth Caedus, strung along under his Sith influence by being taught the most sci-fi Force power in all of Legends: flow-walking. 

She harnesses the power—a cross between time travel and a lucid Force vision--in order to relive one of her most life-changing and heartbreaking moments over and over again. And she can’t move on. Thus she is somehow Jedi, Sith, Yuuzhan Vong, with her identity caught in-between heroes, villains, and galactic forces competing for her along the way.