written by David Steffen
Star Vs. the Forces of Evil is an action comedy cartoon about an interdimensional mage-warrior princess (Eden Sher) who was sent to Earth for a while where she made friends with earthling Marco Diaz (Adam McArthur) . Season 1 was previously reviewed here, Season 2 reviewed here, and Season 3 reviewed here. Season 4, the final season of the series, aired between March 2019 and May 2019. This review will have spoilers for previous seasons.
Season 3 ended with the resolution of an epic threat against the kingdom of Mewni from the half-monster half-Mewman Meteora (Jessica Walter) is achieved when her mother Eclipsa (Esmé Bianco) casts a spell that reduces her to a baby. Star, who had been acting queen because her mother Moon (Grey Griffin) is missing, cedes the throne to Eclipsa who is the rightful queen of Mewni, who has been imprisoned in a crystal for hundreds of years, also giving her the family wand as her rightful property. Eclipsa immediately begins work reversing many of the laws that supported the royal family’s anti-monster sentiment, as Eclipsa’s beloved is a monster, and her daughter a half-monster. Meanwhile, Star and Marco search for Moon based on a series of half-formed rumors about sightings of her. Eclipsa’s beloved, Globgor (Jaime Camil), is imprisoned in crystal and she has not succeeded in freeing him.
Everything that the series has built up to comes to a head in this season. It still has a lot of fun and moments of levity, but the stakes are higher than ever. Again at the end of the last season the world as we know it has been upturned with the succession leaving Eclipsa in charge of the kingdom, and Star and her parents shown to be descendents of impostors to the throne. With the threat of Meteora gone, new threats arise, threats that put the very existence of Mewni in question.
I love this show so much, I highly recommend it!
Have you seen the Disney XD show Gravity Falls, created by Alex Hirsch? If you haven’t, you should! And you should probably do it before you read this book, because it’s a tie-in that will have major spoilers for the show–I think it will generally work better watching the show first, and then reading the book. 
I don’t usually talk much about book design in the reviews, but this book is really really nice. Usually I’m kindof ambivalent about book jackets, because I’m honestly not sure what purpose they serve. But in this case, the book jacket includes all the stuff that you would expect to see on a book cover–the title on the cover, the title on the spine, the blurbs on the backet, the bar code. But if you remove the book jacket, the book cover matches quite closely to the appearance of the journal on the show–no title on the spine, no blurbs or barcode, and the cover is just a six-fingered golden hand with a number “3” drawn on it. It’s very eye-catching and consistent with the show which is cool. AND, the inside of the book jacket has extra illustrations–blueprints of science fictional contraptions from the series, images which don’t appear anywhere else. The book also comes with one of those nice attached-to-the-binding silky bookmarks that I’m used to only seeing in hymnals at church–very nice touch.
Inside the book there are three distinct sections. The first is the contents of the journal before Dipper finds it in episode 1 of the series. You see these pages in the show, but usually only briefly and you can only make out the titles and major illustrations. The book contains all of those, as well as some that I don’t think ever appear in the show, so this part is my favorite part of the journal, because you are reading what Dipper read on his own. The second part happens DURING the show, and is Dipper writing new pages into the journal. I love the show, but I found this the weakest section because I had already seen the episodes, so it felt redundant, and each episode covered in the book only covered a couple pages, so it also felt rushed and without the characteristic humor of the show. The third section happens near the end of the series, after a major event that I won’t spoil for you, but which changes the nature of the content of the journal again. The design all makes sense, but I found that middle section pretty weak.