The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton (1994)

 The Courtship of Princess Leia

credit: Wookiepeida
Is Isolder on there twice, or did the artist not know how to draw Han?

    I was pretty excited for this one. Isolder's an interesting character, we get to go to Dathomir, Han and Leia usually have good chemistry. Instead, it was (for approximately a year until tomorrow's novel came out) the worst Star Wars book written.

What It Introduces:

Dathomir and Hapes: Two female led planets! Wow, isn't that so weird and coincidental. One is a death world and the other is rich.

Happan Battle Dragons and Nova Crusiers: The Happan starships. They like ion cannons and their turbo lasers are less good, so they just stack a million on there. The Battle Dragons look like space Lazy Susans and spin to shoot faster.

Nightwitches: Force witches!

Orbital Night Cloak: It's the umbrella ship's from the Thrawn books, but now it's a super weapon.

Summary: President "My Only Character Trait is Being Fat" wants to whore Leia out to secure funding and a home for Alderanian refugees. Isolder and his Queen Mom show up and propose, and bring a MIND CONTROL GUN as part of his engagement bribe. Leia agrees, so Han SHOOTS HER WITH THE MIND CONTROL GUN and takes her to the planet he won in a Sabacc game (Dathomir). SURPRISE, ZSINJ IS THERE!

They get forced down, and attacked by VERY VERY STRONG Force witches. Luke and Isolder take a Force shortcut and follow them, the rest of the Hapan/New Republic navy follow more closely. 

Eventually, Isolder seduces one of the good Force witches, thus resolving the Han/Leia/Isolder conflict, and they (mostly Luke) beat the bad Force witches. Han blows up Zsinj.

Commentary/Review: Jesus Christ this fucking book. 0/5. At no point is anyone in character, the action scenes are unfollowable, and the attempts at gender politics are laughable. If I had to pick the three biggest faults, they'd be.

1. HAND SHOOTS LEIA WITH A MIND CONTROL GUN. And everyone (except for Luke for about a paragraph) is okay with it. I knew going into this that Han kidnapped Leia. And that seemed like a plausibly Han Solo thing to do. I figured it was like a, "C'mon your worshipfulness, take a ride on my Falcon. Oops, hyperspaced halfway across the galaxy and it broke." I'd even accept some "what's in this drink?" But no, he shoots her with MIND CONTROL GUN. And, again, no one is particularly mad about it. He gets the equivalent of a side-eye from Luke one time, and that's it.

2. THE NIGHT SISTERS ARE SO POWERFUL THAT THEIR PLANET HAS BEEN UNDER INTERDICTION FOR DECADES. Keep in mind that it's already been well established that powerful Jedi can use their powers from across the galaxy, but the Night Sisters, supposedly so powerful that they make Palpatine himself shit himself, apparently can't. He sets up a blockage over the planet, complete with an impractical super-weapon (of course), to stop them. They can make big thunder storms.

3. ZSINJ DIES AS A C? (MAYBE D?) PLOT. After being built up in the RPG, video games, and novels as the most dangerous surviving Imperial, he dies rather unspectacularly in this book. I've complained about Thrawn's bullshit assassination, but at least he got 3 books to terrorize the galaxy. Zsinj is kind of lurking in the shadows for a while. And then suddenly dead.
Credit where credit is due, Zsinj isn't actually built up at this point. I was mixing him up with Zaarin and read some of the WEG sourcebooks out of order.

Awful book. Do not read, even if you're reading all the Star Wars novels.

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