Hello, and welcome once again to our little universe. This time, we have a treat in store. We’re going to visit the world of Acorna, the unicorn girl. Though she collaborated with Margaret Ball on the first two Acorna novels, this time Anne McCaffrey teams up with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, an expert in the field of fantasy. Let’s go see what these two ladies have cooked up for us. Fasten your seatbelts, folks. It’s going to be a wild ride.

Acorna’s Rebels
Third in the Acorna Series
By Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Eos (Harper Collins) — February 2003
ISBN: 0-380-97899-7 — Hardcover
Science Fiction
Explicit Violence

Reviewed by Jo Rogers, MyShelf.Com
Buy it at Amazon.Com

    Acorna’s Rebels is the third story of the Linyaari girl whom the humans call Acorna. Found as an infant in a life pod, she was raised by three human miners. They called her Acorna, because, though she is humanoid, she has many traits of the unicorn of old Earth, including the horn in the middle of her forehead. Indeed, the Linyaari were created by a race of shape shifters from the unicorns they rescued from extinction.

     Acorna is now grown and has found her people. They were attacked by an insectoid race they call the Khleevi. These have no regard for other life forms. They invade a world, take what they want from it and destroy the rest, rendering it totally uninhabitable. Thus they did to Vhiliinyar, the Linyaari home world. They were defeated with the aid of the humans when they tired to invade narhii-Vhiliinyar, the new world the Linyaari had resettled on.

     Now, Acorna, known as Khornya by her people, is helping them rebuild Vhiliinyar. While she is here, she is also awaiting the return of Aari, her life mate. He has gone back in time to discover the origin of the cat species that once existed on Vhiliinyar. But no word of him has been received. Seeing Acorns’s distress, Jonas Becker, the salvage ship captain that helped defeat the Khleevi, asked her to accompany him and his friend, Nadhari Kando, a Federation soldier from the planet Makahomia, to MOO, the Moon of Opportunity. There, she could visit friends and relatives while Becker, Nadhari, MacKenZ, his android, and the cat, RK, short for Roadkill, conducted some salvage business.

    However, on their way to MOO, Becker’s Southern engineering gave way, with a little help from RK. The Khleevi controls he had adapted to his salvage ship shorted out, and they crashed on a planet called Praxos. Though it looked solid, the area they landed in was swamp, and the Condor began to sink into the quicksand. Becker sent up a mayday, which was answered by the Arkansas Traveler, a trade ship piloted by Scaradine "Scar" MacDonald. He just happened to be passing through on his way to deliver farm equipment. His ship’s powerful tractor beam pulled Condor out of the quicksand just before Condor sank past her viewports. She needed immediate repairs, so Nacdonald and her to the nearest Federation outpost, which happened to be Nadhari’s homeworld.

     Once there, they encountered a crisis. The sacred cats, the Makahomian protectors, were dying. So were many of the farm animals and plants in the area. Acorna healed the four Temple cats left in the area, but they couldn’t fly over the rest of the planet and see if the others could be saved. The Makahomians were engaged in an ongoing civil war, and no modern technology could be introduced anywhere without risking one side prevailing over the others. On top of that, one of the priests was murdered by something obviously not human. Some kind of political intrigue involving the Federation commander and Nadhari’s cousin was going on and Acorna, Becker and Nadhari felt they had to get to the bottom of it before Makahomia was destroyed completely. Could they unravel the scheme in time?

    This is a story that will keep you reading long past your bedtime. Acorna is a loveable lady and RK is a perfectly adorable cat. The action and mystery are nonstop.

     Anne McCaffrey has long been one of my favorite authors because her work is always engrossing. I was not disappointed this time either. Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is an award winning fantasy author who also never disappoints. I can think of no better combination to tell the story of space faring unicorn people.

Normally, I have an interview with the author, but that wasn’t possible this time. So we must end our a little ahead of schedule. Until April, Happy reading!