Now, we know that Timothy Zahn may have planned this all along, but so much had happened to the character since he created her all those years ago it was hard for us to envision how he could move these characters with such a strange relationship to a level where we would finally cheer Luke finding the woman of his dreams. We were leery coming into this second Zahn trilogy, hoping that this character (who had grown so confusing and just plain annoying) would progress to a point where we felt she was deserving of being married to the Hero of the Rebellion.

Well, as you can guess that our hopes were dashed. In our opinion, the courtship Zahn gave us has to be the single-most unromantic one in the history of the written word. It was rushed, the characters going from absolutely nothing to lovers in a matter of what seemed minutes. Mary's snotty attitude annoyed us, her cold and shabby treatment of Luke disgusted us, and Luke and Mara's mysterious sudden realization that "they were meant to be together" and that "they were the other half of the other" while they were about to be killed seemed way too desperate and convenient to sit well with us. We half expected them to look at one another once it was all over and say "That was just a knee jerk reaction to us thinking we were gonna die. Let's forget it ever happened. No hard feelings." But that wouldn't happen in the GFFA. Nope. Mara and Luke "bonded somehow through the Force," Leia and Han were happy for them (didn't anyone ever say "Yo Luke, she tried to KILL you a dozen times? Are you stupid or just desperately horny?"), and all was well in the galaxy.