Rey’s identity crisis from the Skywalker saga gets a novel resolution
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Polygon says Madeleine Roux’s novel Star Wars: Legacy offers a more convincing explanation for Rey taking the Skywalker name by focusing on her search for identity, belonging and guidance after The Last Jedi. Rather than treating the choice as a sudden ending beat in The Rise of Skywalker, the book frames it as the outcome of Rey’s growing bond with Leia Organa and her effort to understand where she fits within the Jedi tradition. That matters because it attempts to repair one of the sequel trilogy’s most disputed character arcs and fill a gap many fans felt the films left unresolved.
Set between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, the story follows Rey as she tries to heal her damaged lightsaber by travelling to Tython in search of a special Jedi forge. She is joined by Leia, Chewbacca, R2-D2 and C-3PO, and the novel uses the mission to explore both Rey’s fear of her inner darkness and Leia’s grief over Han, Luke and Ben. Published by Random House Worlds, the book also draws on Tython’s established importance in Star Wars canon, using the planet’s Jedi history to give Rey’s emotional and spiritual journey more context.
- A new novel reworks Rey’s path to becoming a Skywalker.
- Leia is central to Rey’s growth and sense of belonging.
- The story fills the gap between the final two sequel films.
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Rey's place in the Star Wars story has long been debated, particularly her decision at the end of The Rise of Skywalker to take the Skywalker name, even though she has no blood connection to that family. Many fans and critics felt this moment was rushed on screen, arriving as a final beat rather than something the trilogy had properly built towards. A new novel, Star Wars: Legacy by Madeleine Roux, revisits that gap by exploring what happened to Rey in the period between the films The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker.
The book centres on Rey's relationship with Leia Organa, one of the saga's founding characters, as the pair travel together with the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO and the character Chewbacca to the planet Tython, a location with deep ties to the Jedi order in Star Wars lore. Their mission is to repair Rey's damaged lightsaber, but the journey also becomes a way of examining Rey's uncertainty about her identity and her fears about her own darker impulses, alongside Leia's grief over the losses of Han, Luke and her son Ben.
This matters to fans because the sequel trilogy's handling of Rey's parentage and eventual choice of name was one of its most contested elements. Star Wars: Legacy is being discussed as an attempt, through the expanded universe of novels, to give that decision a clearer emotional foundation than the films provided.
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Originally published by Polygon as “Star Wars’ latest story fixes the controversial ending of The Rise of Skywalker”.