Make Your Year the Best It Can Be With ‘Star Wars Everyday’ by Ashley Eckstein
As the days grow shorter and the temperatures drop, there’s a lot of incentive to spend more time inside. In this day and age of hyper stimulation, falling into the binge-watch and doomscroll traps is easy when the sun sets a bit earlier. If you’re looking to turn off the television and put down the phone, Insight Editions’ forthcoming Star Wars Everyday can be a helpful tool. And who better to guide you through the crafts and recipes inside this book than Ahsoka Tano herself, Ashley Eckstein!
Star Wars Everyday is nothing short of delightful! I’m not a crafty person at all and have never aspired to be, but I’m going to embrace these thoughtful tasks within the book. Ashley collaborated with Elena P. Craig and Kelly Knox, bringing a variety of Star Wars related crafts, recipes, and activities for fans of all ages. Some of these crafts may take a couple hours, others you may need a few afternoons or evenings to complete. They are for all skill levels and would be great to do in groups, whether that’s with family or your best fan friends.
What I appreciate most is Ashley’s relentless optimism comes through in every page of this book. Ahsoka Tano is one of my favorite Star Wars characters, and Ashley doesn’t shy away from invoking her in Star Wars Everyday. The book opens with a quiet meditation to begin the New Year. Ashley offers a guided meditation, goal planning, and ways to make yourself accountable to yourself (while still giving yourself grace). Ashley slow walks readers into these new habits. Her approach and the way this book is laid out encourage readers to take their time. So many of us fall into the trap of making extreme overhauls on our daily lives, which usually don’t stick, instead of slowly creating habits.
Ashley also encourages readers to spread the joy they take from the exercises and crafts from Star Wars Everyday. There are all kinds of wonderful suggestions in here, but my favorite are the lunch box notes. To me, they don’t even have to be lunch box notes. It’s the act of writing down something you’ve taken from Star Wars and sharing it with someone you know it will resonate with or who may need to hear it. Yes, I know Star Wars is made-up and in space, but the sources informing George Lucas’ crafting of the tenets of the Force and themes of Star Wars certainly are not. Simply saying, many quotes from Star Wars are the distillation of some great thinkers and timeless mythologies in our own world. There’s a reason these stories remain so popular. These themes are embedded in our subconscious, and sometimes hearing them through a Jedi, a Resistance mechanic, or a scavenger from Jakku are exactly what we need.
And don’t worry, there are plenty of recipes to be made! There have been no shortage of Star Wars cookbooks coming from Insight Editions over the last few years. Star Wars Everyday adds some new recipes to the culinary canon! Some of them stay in character, reading like they’re grounded in the galaxy far, far away. Others, like the gingerbread character recipe above, well…you get the picture. These are all new recipes, and they range from treats, healthy snacks, beverages, and feasts. With the holidays on the horizon, these should come in handy for any Star Wars watch parties you might be having.
Star Wars Everyday manages to bring in elements across all the stories of the galaxy far, far away. Ashley Eckstein has done so much giving back to Star Wars fans and this is another huge contribution. We can’t ever predict what the next year will bring, and with how rough things have been for many, sometimes we’d rather not. Star Wars Everyday might help you slow down, take each day as they come, and at the very least, look forward to whatever fun craft you’re getting into or delicious treat you’re going to make for your friends. By taking small steps, sometimes we find a much larger (and better) world.
Star Wars Everyday is currently available for pre-order and is out October 25th where books are sold. Special thanks to Insight Editions for the copy used in this review.
Kyle Larson lives in Portland, Oregon. When he's not running trails, he's reading and writing.
