Second Wave

Like most of her work alone and with co-writers, this is another rousing tale. Takes place in the Acorna universe and is geared as usual to a young teen audience, although enjoyable as a quick read for adults. This is the nineth in the series and carries Acorna's daughter towards a meeting with her unknown twin sister. A galactic plague precludes her meeting up with Acorna and Arii, as well as the twin sister who also does not know of the connection. Only the ship's cat does and he's not talking. But all's well that ends well, if not here then in the next volume: Third Watch. McCaffrey has come a long way since the early days of the world of Pern 30 odd years ago. Her writing has been a constant ever since. As much as I enjoy her characters and plots, the one criticism I'd level, is the lack of depth. Neither the characters nor the plots have much, unlike those of C. J. Cherryh or Marion Bradley which come with great depth and complexity. Still, the subjects she chooses get decent treatment and aren't meant to be literary tracts in the first place.

I got this book on a friday and was reading the last page by Sunday night. I couldn't put it down. I enjoyed this book as much as the rest of the Acorna Series. I can't wait for the next one.

This book is similar to those others in this series by the author. They allow you to see what is being written about as if you were there. This story tells how Acorna daughters work out being picked on by the preancestors and how then they learn that they are sisters.

Second Wave (2006) is the second SF novel in the Acorna's Children series, following First Warning. In the previous novel, Khorii succeeded in healing plague victims on various planets, moons and ships, but could not heal her parents. She and her friends frustrated and abandoned Marl Kidd, a wannabe pirate and pillager of dead planets. She also decided that the plague was not natural and determined to find and stop the beings who have used it. In this novel, Khorii is part of the plague cleanup effort, but is resting between missions on Palodura, where the plague had started. Sesseli, the youngest member of the Mana crew, wakes her with a loud scream. She has just seen movement of a grave marker in the makeshift cemetery in the former city square. Convinced that Sesseli is imaging things, the rest of the crew reassures her and Alviiz goes down to check out the graveyard. Unfortunately, Jalonzo the gamer has more colorful ideas and Sesseli spends the rest of the night in bed with Khorii and Khiindi. Subsequent events make Khorii and others reconsider their scoffing of Sesseli's fears. Several children in the building claim to have seen the ghosts of their relatives. Others start to see such ghosts, including Elviiz the android, who is unlikely to be hallucinating. Still, many comment that the behavior of these ghosts is not consistent with the persons that they resemble. Marl Kidd breaks out of jail and uses the communications center to call some of his associates. Strange things start to happen while he is there and the child on duty is quite happy to leave him alone with the zooming couches. After contacting a pirate crew, Marl is startled to notice that something dead-looking occupies each of the misbehaving couches. He barely makes it out of the comm center before the couches can catch up with him, but the undead creatures are not stopped by the closed door. As he hurries to the shuttle port, an unwholesome crew follows behind him. Even though the shuttle pilot comments on his companions, Marl notices nothing unusual until the vessel starts to fall apart around him. The pirates are rather irritated at him when they receive a chewed up shuttle with a dead pilot. The pirates follow the Mana to Rushima and send Marl down with two of their men to overcome the crew. Marl tries to scare Khorii into cooperation, but people with guns keep interrupting his efforts. The final straw comes with the collapse of the pirate shuttle, which is apparently eaten by ghosts. Meanwhile, Narhii -- a previously unknown twin of Khorii -- learns that she has family in her future and escapes from the Friends to reunite with her sister. When she appears among the sii-Linyaari, her statements are questioned at first, but everything proves out and she is welcomed into the family. She is given a new name -- Arrinye -- after her father and the nickname of Ariin. Ariin lacks prior experience with Linyaari or humans, but does know the true identity o

Khorii is a member of the Linyaari race created from the DNA material of a unicorn sentient species rescued from Old Terra by the Ancestral Friends, a shapeshifting, time traveling space voyaging race. She, like all Linyaari, has a horn that heals her people and humans. Khorii follows in the footsteps of her famous Mother Acorna by discovering a new way to heal an entire planet from a plague that killed billions (see FIRST WARNING). Now the Linyaari are mopping up as the plague seems to have finally burned itself out; Khorii is in the thick of the operation as she is only one who can see the plague. On planets where the plague has been reported, strange phenomena occur. The ghosts of dead plague victims appear and inorganic objects abruptly implode. Khorii and her newfound twin, who traveled from far back in time to be reunited with her family who never knew she existed, must figure out what is going on before civilization comes to a halt in a very large inhabited sector of the galaxy. What makes this series special is the reader is thoroughly immersed in the Linyaari culture. SECOND WAVE picks up where FIRST WAVE left off and proves exciting and past-paced though newcomers should start with the previous tale first as references are frequent to the events in that thriller. The heroine, though young, is a feisty fighter willing to do what it takes to save worlds and those who live on them though this time a sense of foreboding that Khorii and readers feel climaxes into a shocking final revelation. Harriet Klausner