The Jedi Prince Series (1992 and 1993)

 The first young readers series. Kids these days will never know the joy of monthly paperbacks of questionable (and possibly ghost written) quality via Scholastic catalog. These are actually really weird compared to the others, for the simple reason that they basically got chucked out of canon. Unlike Dark Empire I don't think the necessarily deserved it. Long story short, "Ken" is a young Jedi raised by droids in a hidden city under Yavin IV. This is probably the biggest canon hurdle. Luke sets up his academy there, and there's supposed to be a whole Jedi library and stuff there? They could've destroyed it. It gets pretty badly damaged by the end of the books. He hangs around with Luke, Han (who is in maximum "cool bachelor" mode in these books), etc. as kid sidekicks were wont to do in these sorts of stories. They deal with some Imperial Moffs (who have a Moffship, a Mofference, and say "dark greetings" to each other), the Prophets of the Dark Side (Sith wizards who predict the future. They make it into canon), Palpatine's illegitimate kid, a mutant disguised as him, and Zorba The Hutt (Jabba's dad. Also makes it to canon). They're not great, but they're not bad, especially for disposable tie in novels. This is the start (I guess Feyla's plan in the Thrawn books is sort of a prelude) of the early EU just dumping on Ackbar. He's basically Luke's chauffer on Calamari in the first book, and he never gets treated much better in the later ones. We also get some good over the top 90s kids book villainy and bodily horror. People screaming as their bodies are dissolved in acid, that sort of thing. Animorphs has a well deserved reputation for its tweenage body horror, but it was really all over the place in these days.

I can't recommend these over the later Junior Jedi Knights series, but they're fine for what they are. Or if you just want a weekend of easy junk reading. I think I read one (Zorba The Hutt's Revenge) or two as a kid. I remember him getting spit up by the Sarlacc.