Probably all self-proclaimed nerds have dipped their toes into the pool of tie-in books for a franchise they like at one point or another, and I'm no exception. However, I mostly gave up on the concept years ago because reading a Star Wars book when what you really want is a new Star Wars* movie is about as satisfying as eating Hamburger Helper when what you're really craving is filet mignon. 
 * Feel free to insert your own prequel joke here. 
 Yet, the idea of Chuck Wendig doing a book as part of the new post-Lucas official canon that was going to bridge the gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens..... Well, that's the same kind of siren call that lured Darth Vader to the dark side. 
 The results are mixed. Wendig does a decent job of creating a new cast of characters and giving them a worthy adventure set immediately after the end of Jedi. This runs into the problem of trying to introduce new characters to a franchise like Star Wars in a tie-in book though. We haven't seen these people on screen before so there's just no way that a reader is going to be as invested in them as the ones we know. 
 Plus, you can tell that Wendig was hobbled by the requirements of writing a book that is set between the last phase of the franchise and the new one. It's obvious that he couldn't do anything that would give anything away about the new movie, and that's frustrating because one of the most interesting parts to me was the tidbits we get about what the remains of the Empire's forces are planning to do. 
 This also severely limited him at using any of the major characters. Wendig tries to skirt around that by incorporating Wedge Antilles, but he was a bit player at best in the movies and even here he has little more than a supporting role. This makes the one brief chapter that actually features a couple of the big cheeses seem like a tease in the same way that Samuel L. Jackson popping his head in the door for an episode of Agents of SHIELD isn't all that much fun. 
 It's not a bad Star Wars book, I've certainly read worse, but it may have been more satisfying if it was done after the release of the new movie so that Wendig could have told us more rather than dancing around so much of it.