Acorna's Quest: Novel

✍ Scribed by Anne McCaffrey; Margaret Ball

• Publisher: HarperCollins;HarperPrism
• Year: 1998;1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 188 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

"I must find my own kind!"

Found as an infant drifting in space, Acorna, the Unicorn Girl, has become a young woman. She still has her tiny, translucent horn, and her "funny" feet and hands. And, she still has her miraculous ability to make plants grow and heal human sickness.

But Acorna has strange dreams of a gentle folk who mind-speak by touching horns. With her "Uncle" Calum, one of the three grizzled asteroid prospectors who rescued, protected, and raised her, she sets off to find her people. No sooner does she leave than a mysterious craft appears, piloted by the Linyaari, a gentle race with telepathic powers.

The Linyaari are roaming the galaxy, spreading the alarm about the deadly Khleev--And searching for a beloved little girl they had given up for lost, long ago...

Amazon.com Review

This SF team's earlier novel, Acorna, introduced the alien girl Acorna, an orphan rescued and reared by space-faring humans. Though generally human-shaped, she shares some features with the unicorn of myth--notably, a forehead horn that can heal and purify. Now Acorna blasts off with human friends in search of her own race, who shortly turn up looking for her. These gentle, horned nonhumans are fleeing other aliens who are wanton murderers and torturers that resemble huge cockroaches. Meanwhile, a starship full of dispossessed human miners picks up a scientist whose devastating system of planetary weather control inspires some on-board criminals to stage a coup and use the weather machine to blackmail whole planets; Acorna stumbles into this conflict. Meanwhile, a spacefleet of killer roaches is on its way.

These storylines mix romance, light comedy, and some violent action, which is generally downplayed or dealt with offstage. Of course, the verminous villains find humanity a tougher proposition than nice unicorn-folk and complain bitterly: "They are barbaric and vicious beyond belief; when attacked, they actually fight back!" Happy endings emerge, with room for more sequels. Overall, Acorna's Quest feels like a romping, uncomplicated SF adventure intended for younger readers and Anne McCaffrey devotees. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

Introduced in McCaffrey and Ball's Acorna: The Unicorn Girl (1997), the eponymous unicorn-horned girl of mysterious origins was found in a jettisoned spaceship's escape pod by kindly asteroid miners, and raised to young adulthood in secret in order to keep unsavory space businessmen from exploiting her superior intelligence and psychic abilities. This second book in the series finds Acorna determined to escape the protective bubble her friends have built around her and to set off across space in search of her people. Her trip stalls early on, however, when trouble with her ship forces her and her space-pilot partner, Calum, to land on Rushima. There they find starving colonists, victims of a nefarious band of Starfarers who used stolen meteorological technology to wreck Rushima's weather when the colonists wouldn't submit to their extortion plot. Acorna and Calum are captured by these Starfarers, then rescued by rebel Starfarers and caught up in a small-scale civil war. Meanwhile, Acorna's people, the Linyaari, are seeking allies in their war against the evil, insectiod Khlevii?who just happen to be headed toward Rushima. Despite brief moments of mild humor, the novel struggles under the weight of stereotypical characters, a predictable plot and an excess of backstory. Only faithful McCaffrey (the Dragonriders of Pern series) fans are likely to enjoy this weak series entry.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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