OOC: So you wanted spoilers
So a while back, when I first brought in Jaina, people asked for spoilers for the books, and it turned out to be a really big undertaking to write things out. So with the right motivation (Hi, spotlight post!) I went ahead and wrote them all out.
Warning: SERIOUSLY, SPOILERS for the entire Star Wars series before the NJO. If you don't really wanna know, move along. These aren't the droids you're looking for.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, an evil Empire took over and the good guys put a stop to that. (Shortest summary of that story ever, huh?) Afterwards, there was a lot of time spent rebuilding the galaxy and putting together the New Republic, and reforming the Jedi, and all that other fun stuff.
I'll add this disclaimer. I'm missing a few of the books from my reading library. Some of these books I put down when I was fourteen and haven't gone back to. I'm doing most of this from memory and Wookieepedia, but this is the books as I know them.
We start with The Truce at Bakura, which takes place immediately after Return of the Jedi. The Alliance decided it's going to start rebuilding by forging a truce with the Bakurans, and there were invading aliens called the Ssi-ruuk who fed off life-energy and the whole story was kind of terrible. Still, Leia got to give a ghostly version of Anakin Skywalker the what for in his only appearance in the books, and Luke falls head over heels for Gaeriel Captison, a girl he's never going to be with. I recommend you start a scorecard for that. Or maybe a drinking game.
Meanwhile, the military is putting itself back together, too. Wedge Antilles reforms Rogue Squadron, assembling some of the galaxy's best pilots (hi, Corran Horn! Hi, Gavin Darklighter!) into the ranks along with some of the Rogue staples like Wes Janson and Tycho Celchu and it's kind of awesome. They retake Coruscant, put down Imperial warlord Ysanne Isard, Tycho gets framed for Corran's murder-that-never-happened, and all in all, these books are probably the darkest of the earlier books, in a really good way. And they're just hysterical in parts. Things get awesomer when they spin off the Wraith Squadron books, which detail their issues with the Imperial warlord Zsinj and are full of people who are amazingly more out there and suicidal.
Then comes The Courtship of Princess Leia. Leia's negotiating or something with Isolder, the Prince of Hapes, which is the main planet in a cluster of I think sixty-four that he rules. Kinda. The Hapans are highly matriarchal, and are actually ruled by The Queen Mother, who's more interested in Luke. Ew. Anyway, Han's not happy with his girlfriend flirting with a prince, but Leia's too busy being OOC to notice, so he wins a planet in a card game. As you do. This doesn't impress her, and so Han kidnaps her to the planet to... show her how cool it is, or something. Now it's Isolder's turn to not be happy, so he joins forces with Luke, who is already in the early stages of personality removal, to find them. There they meet up with Force witches, including Teneniel Djo, who captures Luke intending to marry him, which was not on his to-do list for the day. Han wins Leia back through use of a theme song (NO, SERIOUSLY), Isolder decides maybe he should hook up with Teneniel instead, Han and Leia get married, and Luke ends up alone again. Drink.
Five years after the Battle of Endor, in the Thrawn trilogy, the group has taken up residence on Coruscant, Leia's working as a Councilor for the New Republic and is pregnant with twins, and Luke's kinda left going "...Yeah, I have no idea wtf I'm doing." This is made worse when Obi-wan Kenobi appears to him for the last time to say goodbye, as he is now on his way to go wherever magical ghost bodies go. (Given the whole thing where Qui-Gon taught him to commune with the living in ROTS, it kinda makes Obi-wan look bitchy in retrospect.) As this is happening, we meet Mara Jade, who is working as second-in-command to smuggler Talon Karrde, and starts acting a little on the funny side when Luke crosses their paths. This would be because Mara was once the Emperor's Hand, Palpatine's servant to do all his dirty work. She was supposed to kill Luke on Jabba's sand barge in ROTJ, but failed at even getting on the barge, so when Palpatine died, she still hadn't completed her last mission. This has made her understandably bitter, as the Empire was her whole life, and never having really had Jedi training outside what she learned from the Emperor, she'd kinda stuck. So when Karrde captures Luke to see who'll pay highest for him and he escapes, Mara's hellbent on getting him back. Does she kill him? No. Of course not, he's the main character.
Meanwhile, we have a new bad guy in Grand Admiral Thrawn, who's still trying to bring the Empire to a comeback with help of an alien race called the Noghri. Their planet was destroyed and enslaved by the Empire, but they've kinda got a soft spot for the Imperial emissary, Vader. As in, when Leia checks the place out to see what's going on, she gets called Lady Vader and you can bet she's just loving that. Also, Thrawn is teaming up with Joruus C'baoth, an insane Dark Jedi who turns out to be a clone. Because after seeing that the clone troopers went from being kinda badass to being the butt of jokes for being unable to hit the broad side of a barn, cloning is still a good idea.
Leia gives birth to twins (hi, Jacen and Jaina), and after a kidnapping attempt that's blamed on Mara (who still hasn't killed Luke, btw), Han and Luke break Mara out of custody to take her to the Imperial cloning facility on Wayland. There they have a confrontation with C'baoth who's just freaking lost it, and they find out that Luke had been cloned from the hand he lost in ESB, which ew, and why, and who went looking for it? Mara kills Luuke (see, double vowels is how you know it's a clone), thus completing the Emperor's last command to her, and now they can be friends. With the Noghri having believed Leia over Thrawn about the Empire not being Good, one of them does away with Thrawn. He's gone, C'boath's dead like a dead thing, and Mara's left with Luke's first lightsaber and a chance at Jedi training she totally doesn't take.
And the Noghri assign themselves to Leia as her bodyguards. You'd never know this reading the books after this.
But wait! The whacked ass cloning is not done with! Luke heads off to this one planet where a cloned version of Palpatine is hanging around. Apparently curious, Luke goes "Whee, let's check out the dark side!" And no, I haven't done much more than flip through this comic, but from all reports? This is the basic impetus for that decision. The Emperor's clone decides also that he should just go ahead and possess Leia's unborn son Anakin, too, and dude, like that kid won't have enough problems? Leia says "hell no", drags Luke's confused ass back to the light, and the Emperor goes away, I think for the last time.
DESPITE THIS, by the time the Jedi Academy rolls around, Luke decides that he's not only worthy to appoint himself to Jedi Master, but he's qualified to teach others. Dumbass. Okay, I get that someone had to do it, but he is not making awesome decisions right now, omg. Mara turns him down flat on being formally trained and she's really kinda smart for that. Luke starts the Jedi Academy on Yavin 4, the same moon where the Battle of Yavin took place in ANH, and piles a bunch of random people in there to teach them to be Jedi. One of them is Kyp Durron, who Han found on an accidental side trip to the spice mines of Kessel and rescued. Kyp's brother had been conscripted to the Empire, and he had some issues and kind of wanted the Empire to die die die. Luke was not down with this, so Kyp wandered into a random temple and started taking lessons from the long dead spirit of a Sith lord named Exar Kun, who started picking off his students one by one. Luke? Doesn't move the Academy. Not only that, but Kyp thinks it's a good idea to mindwipe Qwi Xux, the mastermind behind some Imperial superweapons and steal something called the Sun Crusher after putting Luke in a coma. He then goes ahead to blow up the Imperial academy on Carida, only to find out he just exploded his brother. Oops.
Luke, by the way? Saved by JACEN. Who at this point in canon is TWO. And handling a LIGHTSABER. And to make things wtfier, after all this? He makes Kyp a Jedi Knight anyway. DUMBASS.
To add to wtf, because we have not quite reached the point where your brain starts to liquify, Mara's all with Lando. Yes, LANDO. I don't know why. No one does.
However, not is all lost, as the writer of the Rogue Squadron books also puts I, Jedi at the same time, and sticks Corran in the middle of events to make things make sense. And he and Mara are kind of on the sidelines going "...Does this make sense to you?" "No. You either? Good."
In Children of the Jedi, um. Okay, look, this is my most hated of all SW books. I actually stopped reading for a while after this sucker. There's something with a Jedi planet, and Mara finding out there were other Emperor's Hands that she's kind of not happy with, but the important thing is that Luke ends up aboard a ship? called the Eye of Palpatine where somehow he ends up falling in love with this old time Jedi named Callista who survived the Jedi Purges (God, Anakin, do your job better. Jeez.)... whose consciousness is trapped inside the ship's onboard computer. Yeah. After solving whatever the problem was, which I admit I totally ignored because I was too busy wtfing and wondering why if Luke was that desperate he didn't just call Mara and tell her to ditch Lando, Callista ends up inhabiting the body of one of Luke's students who gave it up after her boyfriend died and she decided she wanted to be dead, too. I have no words. But Luke and Callista can be together now. Joy.
We are not done with Callista yet, which saddens me. We have Darksaber (and okay, I do love the little bit where Callista's telling Mara there were rumors about her and Luke and Mara's all "Uh huh. Eat your dinner." Though I wish she'd just reached over and like, throttled the bitch's neck. That would have ruled. Look, I never said I was being impartial here.) Meanwhile, the Hutts are building yet another superweapon called the Darksaber, which ultimately doesn't work when they try it, and dude, can we just TRY here? Just a little. Finally Callista can't use her Jedi powers anymore, and the poor baby's taking issue. After dragging Luke through I think every planet in the OT to get them back, she finally takes off with a Dear Luke letter, or something. Drink. She comes back in Planet of Twilight, but I wasn't about to pick it up once I found out it was written by the same person who gave us Callista in the first place, so I was very happy to move on.
Then we skip ahead to The Crystal Star, widely regarded as the worst of the books. I've actually repressed most of it, I think. The Solo kids are kidnapped by a guy named Hethrir, who decides he's going to use them to help bring back the Empire (...which isn't really gone. It's led by Pellaeon, Thrawn's second-in-command, who's actually a nice guy and it's kind of just a political party at this point), and Leia decides that she and Chewie will disguise themselves and go searching for them. The poor twins, by the way, are about a creepy monkey away from being the Wonder Twins in this book. Meanwhile Luke and Han are on a trip where they hang with Han's ex and Luke is freaking bipolar by now, and they discover that Hethrir's little Imperial cult is working with this being Waru. Hethrir is defeated as bad guys tend to be, as is Waru, but not before Luke almost tried to give himself over to him, and I think it was the kids going "...Wtf are you doing?" to get him to maybe rethink that decision. He's got problems.
By the time of the Black Fleet Crisis, Leia's Chief of State of the New Republic, and it's driving her out of her mind. She's dealing with a Yevethan named Nil Spaar, who is trying to expand his territory and take over and purging things, which worked out so well the last time someone else tried that. And there's Luke, who despite having a Jedi order to rebuild and an academy to run, has decided to become a hermit. Because it worked for Obi-wan and Yoda. Look, they only did that because they had to, you dork. He's discovered anyway by a woman named Akanah, who drags him around looking for information on his mother. There's also a hookup and it doesn't work out because she was a lying bitch. Drink. Meanwhile, Lando and the droids wander around on a ship for roughly 8,000 pages.
Then there's The New Rebellion which I own but was lost in a move before I could read it, and the Corellian trilogy, in which Han and Leia take the kids to his homeworld of Corellia and stumble on intrigue! All the main species living there just decided to throw down, and Han's caught in the middle working with a New Republic Intelligence agent named Belini Kalenda because his identical cousin Thracken Sal-Solo- yes you read that right- is all up in it. The kids get some actual, um, screen time by getting separated from their parents and the twins get to fly the Falcon, which just had to be the highlight of their entire year. I seem to remember Mara randomly getting framed for something involved in all this, too. And finally Luke shows up after running around the galaxy helping Lando find a wife (I DON'T KNOW) in order to help stop the crisis and to see Gaeriel from The Truce at Bakura become deadinated. Thusly orphaning her daughter. Oh, look, new guilt for Luke.
Finally we get to the Hand of Thrawn duology, written by Zahn. Thrawn seems to be back despite having been killed dead by a Noghri, and meanwhile Luke goes chasing pirates that seem to be crewed by clones, which brings him back into the path or Karrde and Mara. Mara goes off to investigate a link to Thrawn on Vortex, and Luke has to go after her, which means they spend most of the book in a series of caves, talking as they're led around by the things that live there, except it is AWESOME, because they've been dancing around these topics for TEN FREAKING YEARS. And Zahn does the BEST THING EVER in that he kinda sorta retcons all the crappy stuff that happens over the other books. Mara says being with Lando was just a cover for a mission they were both on and it so never happened, and she smacks Luke hard for all his stupidity, and it's the first books in I don't know how long where I liked Luke. By the end, they find out that the Thrawn thing was a ruse, everything's fixed, and Luke and Mara finally figure out that they've been really dumb and decide to get married like they should have done, I don't know, sometime after the first we saw of Thrawn? That all happens in the comic Union, which I actually really like.
There's also Survivor's Quest by Zahn that I haven't read yet because I can't read and RP at the same time, which deals with Luke and Mara three years later returning to the project that C'baoth had been on back when he was alive and not cloned. One day!
The Bantam books pretty much end chronologically with the kids, I think. There are the Junior Jedi Knight books, which focus on Anakin and his best friend Tahiri Veila and the Jedi bunny rabbit Ikrit, but they were a little young for me, so I skipped them. Oops. There are also the Young Jedi Knights books, which are about Jacen and Jaina at the Jedi Academy, and their friends Lowbacca, Chewie's nephew, and Tenel Ka, who is the daughter of Teneniel and Isolder from The Courtship of Princess Leia. There's also the twins' friend Zekk, an orphan living in the depths of Coruscant who goes over to the dark side and finds his way back. They have plucky adventures and despite my absolute hatred of Kevin J. Anderson, the books are actually nicely readable, if a bit young reader. (Which they're meant to be.) And I love the characters, so there.
Of course, despite the fact that Mara and Luke were married four years before the YJK books, I haven't seen a reference to Mara that I can remember. Because these books were written before the canon screw. Zahn wins.
Warning: SERIOUSLY, SPOILERS for the entire Star Wars series before the NJO. If you don't really wanna know, move along. These aren't the droids you're looking for.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, an evil Empire took over and the good guys put a stop to that. (Shortest summary of that story ever, huh?) Afterwards, there was a lot of time spent rebuilding the galaxy and putting together the New Republic, and reforming the Jedi, and all that other fun stuff.
I'll add this disclaimer. I'm missing a few of the books from my reading library. Some of these books I put down when I was fourteen and haven't gone back to. I'm doing most of this from memory and Wookieepedia, but this is the books as I know them.
We start with The Truce at Bakura, which takes place immediately after Return of the Jedi. The Alliance decided it's going to start rebuilding by forging a truce with the Bakurans, and there were invading aliens called the Ssi-ruuk who fed off life-energy and the whole story was kind of terrible. Still, Leia got to give a ghostly version of Anakin Skywalker the what for in his only appearance in the books, and Luke falls head over heels for Gaeriel Captison, a girl he's never going to be with. I recommend you start a scorecard for that. Or maybe a drinking game.
Meanwhile, the military is putting itself back together, too. Wedge Antilles reforms Rogue Squadron, assembling some of the galaxy's best pilots (hi, Corran Horn! Hi, Gavin Darklighter!) into the ranks along with some of the Rogue staples like Wes Janson and Tycho Celchu and it's kind of awesome. They retake Coruscant, put down Imperial warlord Ysanne Isard, Tycho gets framed for Corran's murder-that-never-happened, and all in all, these books are probably the darkest of the earlier books, in a really good way. And they're just hysterical in parts. Things get awesomer when they spin off the Wraith Squadron books, which detail their issues with the Imperial warlord Zsinj and are full of people who are amazingly more out there and suicidal.
Then comes The Courtship of Princess Leia. Leia's negotiating or something with Isolder, the Prince of Hapes, which is the main planet in a cluster of I think sixty-four that he rules. Kinda. The Hapans are highly matriarchal, and are actually ruled by The Queen Mother, who's more interested in Luke. Ew. Anyway, Han's not happy with his girlfriend flirting with a prince, but Leia's too busy being OOC to notice, so he wins a planet in a card game. As you do. This doesn't impress her, and so Han kidnaps her to the planet to... show her how cool it is, or something. Now it's Isolder's turn to not be happy, so he joins forces with Luke, who is already in the early stages of personality removal, to find them. There they meet up with Force witches, including Teneniel Djo, who captures Luke intending to marry him, which was not on his to-do list for the day. Han wins Leia back through use of a theme song (NO, SERIOUSLY), Isolder decides maybe he should hook up with Teneniel instead, Han and Leia get married, and Luke ends up alone again. Drink.
Five years after the Battle of Endor, in the Thrawn trilogy, the group has taken up residence on Coruscant, Leia's working as a Councilor for the New Republic and is pregnant with twins, and Luke's kinda left going "...Yeah, I have no idea wtf I'm doing." This is made worse when Obi-wan Kenobi appears to him for the last time to say goodbye, as he is now on his way to go wherever magical ghost bodies go. (Given the whole thing where Qui-Gon taught him to commune with the living in ROTS, it kinda makes Obi-wan look bitchy in retrospect.) As this is happening, we meet Mara Jade, who is working as second-in-command to smuggler Talon Karrde, and starts acting a little on the funny side when Luke crosses their paths. This would be because Mara was once the Emperor's Hand, Palpatine's servant to do all his dirty work. She was supposed to kill Luke on Jabba's sand barge in ROTJ, but failed at even getting on the barge, so when Palpatine died, she still hadn't completed her last mission. This has made her understandably bitter, as the Empire was her whole life, and never having really had Jedi training outside what she learned from the Emperor, she'd kinda stuck. So when Karrde captures Luke to see who'll pay highest for him and he escapes, Mara's hellbent on getting him back. Does she kill him? No. Of course not, he's the main character.
Meanwhile, we have a new bad guy in Grand Admiral Thrawn, who's still trying to bring the Empire to a comeback with help of an alien race called the Noghri. Their planet was destroyed and enslaved by the Empire, but they've kinda got a soft spot for the Imperial emissary, Vader. As in, when Leia checks the place out to see what's going on, she gets called Lady Vader and you can bet she's just loving that. Also, Thrawn is teaming up with Joruus C'baoth, an insane Dark Jedi who turns out to be a clone. Because after seeing that the clone troopers went from being kinda badass to being the butt of jokes for being unable to hit the broad side of a barn, cloning is still a good idea.
Leia gives birth to twins (hi, Jacen and Jaina), and after a kidnapping attempt that's blamed on Mara (who still hasn't killed Luke, btw), Han and Luke break Mara out of custody to take her to the Imperial cloning facility on Wayland. There they have a confrontation with C'baoth who's just freaking lost it, and they find out that Luke had been cloned from the hand he lost in ESB, which ew, and why, and who went looking for it? Mara kills Luuke (see, double vowels is how you know it's a clone), thus completing the Emperor's last command to her, and now they can be friends. With the Noghri having believed Leia over Thrawn about the Empire not being Good, one of them does away with Thrawn. He's gone, C'boath's dead like a dead thing, and Mara's left with Luke's first lightsaber and a chance at Jedi training she totally doesn't take.
And the Noghri assign themselves to Leia as her bodyguards. You'd never know this reading the books after this.
But wait! The whacked ass cloning is not done with! Luke heads off to this one planet where a cloned version of Palpatine is hanging around. Apparently curious, Luke goes "Whee, let's check out the dark side!" And no, I haven't done much more than flip through this comic, but from all reports? This is the basic impetus for that decision. The Emperor's clone decides also that he should just go ahead and possess Leia's unborn son Anakin, too, and dude, like that kid won't have enough problems? Leia says "hell no", drags Luke's confused ass back to the light, and the Emperor goes away, I think for the last time.
DESPITE THIS, by the time the Jedi Academy rolls around, Luke decides that he's not only worthy to appoint himself to Jedi Master, but he's qualified to teach others. Dumbass. Okay, I get that someone had to do it, but he is not making awesome decisions right now, omg. Mara turns him down flat on being formally trained and she's really kinda smart for that. Luke starts the Jedi Academy on Yavin 4, the same moon where the Battle of Yavin took place in ANH, and piles a bunch of random people in there to teach them to be Jedi. One of them is Kyp Durron, who Han found on an accidental side trip to the spice mines of Kessel and rescued. Kyp's brother had been conscripted to the Empire, and he had some issues and kind of wanted the Empire to die die die. Luke was not down with this, so Kyp wandered into a random temple and started taking lessons from the long dead spirit of a Sith lord named Exar Kun, who started picking off his students one by one. Luke? Doesn't move the Academy. Not only that, but Kyp thinks it's a good idea to mindwipe Qwi Xux, the mastermind behind some Imperial superweapons and steal something called the Sun Crusher after putting Luke in a coma. He then goes ahead to blow up the Imperial academy on Carida, only to find out he just exploded his brother. Oops.
Luke, by the way? Saved by JACEN. Who at this point in canon is TWO. And handling a LIGHTSABER. And to make things wtfier, after all this? He makes Kyp a Jedi Knight anyway. DUMBASS.
To add to wtf, because we have not quite reached the point where your brain starts to liquify, Mara's all with Lando. Yes, LANDO. I don't know why. No one does.
However, not is all lost, as the writer of the Rogue Squadron books also puts I, Jedi at the same time, and sticks Corran in the middle of events to make things make sense. And he and Mara are kind of on the sidelines going "...Does this make sense to you?" "No. You either? Good."
In Children of the Jedi, um. Okay, look, this is my most hated of all SW books. I actually stopped reading for a while after this sucker. There's something with a Jedi planet, and Mara finding out there were other Emperor's Hands that she's kind of not happy with, but the important thing is that Luke ends up aboard a ship? called the Eye of Palpatine where somehow he ends up falling in love with this old time Jedi named Callista who survived the Jedi Purges (God, Anakin, do your job better. Jeez.)... whose consciousness is trapped inside the ship's onboard computer. Yeah. After solving whatever the problem was, which I admit I totally ignored because I was too busy wtfing and wondering why if Luke was that desperate he didn't just call Mara and tell her to ditch Lando, Callista ends up inhabiting the body of one of Luke's students who gave it up after her boyfriend died and she decided she wanted to be dead, too. I have no words. But Luke and Callista can be together now. Joy.
We are not done with Callista yet, which saddens me. We have Darksaber (and okay, I do love the little bit where Callista's telling Mara there were rumors about her and Luke and Mara's all "Uh huh. Eat your dinner." Though I wish she'd just reached over and like, throttled the bitch's neck. That would have ruled. Look, I never said I was being impartial here.) Meanwhile, the Hutts are building yet another superweapon called the Darksaber, which ultimately doesn't work when they try it, and dude, can we just TRY here? Just a little. Finally Callista can't use her Jedi powers anymore, and the poor baby's taking issue. After dragging Luke through I think every planet in the OT to get them back, she finally takes off with a Dear Luke letter, or something. Drink. She comes back in Planet of Twilight, but I wasn't about to pick it up once I found out it was written by the same person who gave us Callista in the first place, so I was very happy to move on.
Then we skip ahead to The Crystal Star, widely regarded as the worst of the books. I've actually repressed most of it, I think. The Solo kids are kidnapped by a guy named Hethrir, who decides he's going to use them to help bring back the Empire (...which isn't really gone. It's led by Pellaeon, Thrawn's second-in-command, who's actually a nice guy and it's kind of just a political party at this point), and Leia decides that she and Chewie will disguise themselves and go searching for them. The poor twins, by the way, are about a creepy monkey away from being the Wonder Twins in this book. Meanwhile Luke and Han are on a trip where they hang with Han's ex and Luke is freaking bipolar by now, and they discover that Hethrir's little Imperial cult is working with this being Waru. Hethrir is defeated as bad guys tend to be, as is Waru, but not before Luke almost tried to give himself over to him, and I think it was the kids going "...Wtf are you doing?" to get him to maybe rethink that decision. He's got problems.
By the time of the Black Fleet Crisis, Leia's Chief of State of the New Republic, and it's driving her out of her mind. She's dealing with a Yevethan named Nil Spaar, who is trying to expand his territory and take over and purging things, which worked out so well the last time someone else tried that. And there's Luke, who despite having a Jedi order to rebuild and an academy to run, has decided to become a hermit. Because it worked for Obi-wan and Yoda. Look, they only did that because they had to, you dork. He's discovered anyway by a woman named Akanah, who drags him around looking for information on his mother. There's also a hookup and it doesn't work out because she was a lying bitch. Drink. Meanwhile, Lando and the droids wander around on a ship for roughly 8,000 pages.
Then there's The New Rebellion which I own but was lost in a move before I could read it, and the Corellian trilogy, in which Han and Leia take the kids to his homeworld of Corellia and stumble on intrigue! All the main species living there just decided to throw down, and Han's caught in the middle working with a New Republic Intelligence agent named Belini Kalenda because his identical cousin Thracken Sal-Solo- yes you read that right- is all up in it. The kids get some actual, um, screen time by getting separated from their parents and the twins get to fly the Falcon, which just had to be the highlight of their entire year. I seem to remember Mara randomly getting framed for something involved in all this, too. And finally Luke shows up after running around the galaxy helping Lando find a wife (I DON'T KNOW) in order to help stop the crisis and to see Gaeriel from The Truce at Bakura become deadinated. Thusly orphaning her daughter. Oh, look, new guilt for Luke.
Finally we get to the Hand of Thrawn duology, written by Zahn. Thrawn seems to be back despite having been killed dead by a Noghri, and meanwhile Luke goes chasing pirates that seem to be crewed by clones, which brings him back into the path or Karrde and Mara. Mara goes off to investigate a link to Thrawn on Vortex, and Luke has to go after her, which means they spend most of the book in a series of caves, talking as they're led around by the things that live there, except it is AWESOME, because they've been dancing around these topics for TEN FREAKING YEARS. And Zahn does the BEST THING EVER in that he kinda sorta retcons all the crappy stuff that happens over the other books. Mara says being with Lando was just a cover for a mission they were both on and it so never happened, and she smacks Luke hard for all his stupidity, and it's the first books in I don't know how long where I liked Luke. By the end, they find out that the Thrawn thing was a ruse, everything's fixed, and Luke and Mara finally figure out that they've been really dumb and decide to get married like they should have done, I don't know, sometime after the first we saw of Thrawn? That all happens in the comic Union, which I actually really like.
There's also Survivor's Quest by Zahn that I haven't read yet because I can't read and RP at the same time, which deals with Luke and Mara three years later returning to the project that C'baoth had been on back when he was alive and not cloned. One day!
The Bantam books pretty much end chronologically with the kids, I think. There are the Junior Jedi Knight books, which focus on Anakin and his best friend Tahiri Veila and the Jedi bunny rabbit Ikrit, but they were a little young for me, so I skipped them. Oops. There are also the Young Jedi Knights books, which are about Jacen and Jaina at the Jedi Academy, and their friends Lowbacca, Chewie's nephew, and Tenel Ka, who is the daughter of Teneniel and Isolder from The Courtship of Princess Leia. There's also the twins' friend Zekk, an orphan living in the depths of Coruscant who goes over to the dark side and finds his way back. They have plucky adventures and despite my absolute hatred of Kevin J. Anderson, the books are actually nicely readable, if a bit young reader. (Which they're meant to be.) And I love the characters, so there.
Of course, despite the fact that Mara and Luke were married four years before the YJK books, I haven't seen a reference to Mara that I can remember. Because these books were written before the canon screw. Zahn wins.