What was Ahsoka Tano actually doing between walking away at the end of The Clone Wars and showing up in Rebels as the mysterious agent Fulcrum? This novel (E. K. Johnston, 2016) is the answer: about a year after Order 66, in hiding under a fake name, grieving everything, and figuring out who she is now that she's neither a Jedi nor a general.
The smart choice is scale. After the galaxy-ending stakes of the prequel era, the book shrinks to a single farming moon called Raada: one settlement, one cantina, one resource the Empire wants to strip. Ahsoka can't fight the Empire with a fleet here. She fixes threshers, stockpiles rations, and teaches scared farmers a bar game called crokin that becomes the book's central metaphor, and a good one precisely because it's unglamorous. You take a piece, they take a piece, and some games are decided long before anyone realizes they're already lost. That's how the Empire wins. Quietly.
Johnston is really good at the texture of ordinary life under occupation: extended shifts, withheld food, a mean drunk casually executed just to remind everyone who's in charge. Kaeden, the young mechanic who befriends Ahsoka, is the emotional engine, and her captivity stretch is harrowing without ever being lurid. Fear over gore, restraint over melodrama.
The Inquisitor hunting her is more function than character, but the payoff justifies him. What Ahsoka does with the crystals he carries, purifying the corruption out of them until they burn white, is the most resonant image in the book: she's not restoring the old Jedi Order, she's making something new and clean out of what evil twisted. If you've ever wondered why her sabers are white in Rebels, this is the whole answer, and Johnston earns it across three hundred patient pages.
It's YA and reads like it, the prose plain, the interludes hit or miss (Bail Organa building the early Rebellion while fretting over baby Leia: great; the prequel-era flashback cameos: momentum killers). But it's one of the more emotionally honest books in the canon. It respects Ahsoka enough to let her fail, let people die on her watch, and let her carry that weight into the role she chooses.