George Mann's Quest for the Hidden City is the first middle grade release of Phase II of the High Republic publishing initiative. When a Pathfinder droid is found damaged, just floating in space, Jedi Knight Silandra Sho and her Padawan, Rooper Nitani, are called in to try to find the missing Pathfinder team and unravel the mystery of the twin planets, Aubadas & Gloam. Tackling themes of capitalistic greed and environmental ravaging, this book seemed more of a separate cautionary tale than a book tied to the overall story arc of Phase II.

These Phase II books are still just not quite hitting as hard for me as the Phase I books did. An excess number of new characters and droids bogs down the first half of this book as you are trying to work out who is who, and in a book just over 200 pages, that takes up a lot of space with character development. Also, the introduction of yet another dual planet system (with the Eiram - E'ronoh system that is the focal point of the other books in this Phase), makes for the occasional confusing time telling which planet is planet.

This isn't a bad book, but I feel this could have been dropped in any Star Wars time frame, and when you only have a limited number of books to work with in a Phase (this particular round of books only has 2 rounds of books), I feel that each of the books should be tied directly to the main story. Maybe events here will affect something in the second round of Phase II books, but I'm not expecting much. ( )

There are too many characters who talk the same way regardless if they are Jedi or not, human or not, often in the kind of platitudes you'd expect from a middle-grades book I guess. As with Midnight Horizon, there are many bite-sized chapters which I do not think lends itself to a well-told story with proper characterization. ( )