So good! Reminds me why I love her book. Selkies and Space what more do you need

The half human , half selkie twins grown to their teens on the sentient planet Petaybee. A scientific team tries to capture them to treat them as specimens and theey are shipped off to space while still young enough to go. But their troubles are not over.

I'm a big fan of the Petaybee (Powers That Be) series. I was initially surprised at encountering a series that takes on the Gaia hypothesis, albeit in the upbeat McCaffrey (and Scarborough) way. Was utterly charmed by this new offering.

Appears to me to be a crossover of sci/fi and fanasty---I totally enjoyed it.

I've reviewed this trilogy elsewhere: see n  Delugen.

Yana Maddock and her husband Sean Shongili now have twins, Ronan and Murel. The twins share their father's shape-shifting gifts- like him, they can turn into seals when they get wet.

As they got older, the twins wanted to swim farther and farther away to explore, heedless of the potential danger. When their big cat guardians Coaxtl and Nanook can't keep up, their father suggests they find a swimming buddy for when he can't explore with them. On a search for friends, they rescue an otter who was trapped in the ice. When they went to visit his home, they found wolves attacking. Ronan and Murel tried to run them off, but needed to be rescued themselves. Fortunately Coaxtl and Nanook called for help when they lost their young charges, and brought back Sean and his sister Sinead at the head of a rescue party.

After the wolf incident closely followed by some scientists who illegally came to Petaybee to capture animals to experiment on, Sean and Yana sent the twins with their friend Marmion de Revers Algemaine to stay on the space station where she lived to keep them away from those scientists. Unfortunately, one of the scientists had seen the twins change shape, and when she learned where they were, got a teaching assignment on the space station.

One of their classmates was Ke'ola, who like themselves comes from a people displaced from Earth and forced onto a desolate world. Unlike the Petaybeans, Ke'ola's Hawaiian people kept getting shuffled from harsh world to harsh world, seemingly with no end in sight. Once the twins were rescued from the scientist's bad intentions, they invited Ke'ola and the sea turtle his people considered a totem animal to visit Petaybee.

I enjoyed this first of a trilogy featuring the twins and I'm looking forward to seeing more

Changlings by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is the first book in the Twins of Petaybee series set in the Petaybee universe. The main characters in this story are the twin children of Yanaba and Sean Shongili who are the co-governors of Petaybee. This story details their childhood as it also deal with the continual growth of the entity known as Petaybee. While reading this book I found myself thinking that it felt even less like a McCaffrey story than any of the other collaborations as it seemed to have many elements in it that I find either questionable or detestable. While I respect the concept of a living world and acknowledge that the fact that the otters can communicate telepathically as a part of the worlds adaptation of them I found the taking of the other animals who were never there and making them as intelligent as the human characters distasteful. This is probably my inherent racism coming out as I believe that the human race is much greater than any other species God has created on this world. If this was a fantasy novel I would be better wiling to accept the situation as with magic many things are possible which can not happen in our reality. As much as I had an issue with that though my biggest problem was with the group of humans represented by Ke-ola who blame others for all the misfortune in their lives. While I will acknowledge that many groups have been treated badly in the past I do not feel any guilt for something that people have done in the past. While I would not do what they did I will not give the descendants of those wronged a free pass either. In many ways every group in human history has been mistreated at one point or another. This does not mean we should currently stand aside and accept it currently but we must work to build everyone a better future not give guilt offerings which encourage destructive behavior. If you can not support yourself don't have twenty kids because none of them will be better off than you. Your goal for your kids is to make the world a better place for then than yourself not to just propagate more of yourself. We are not fish that we survive better by flooding the waters we are thinking beings you can make a better world for our descendants as God calls us to do. We are blessed to be a blessing to others not a curse.

I have been a fan of Anne McCaffrey since my youth when I read the Pern novels. Like most of her books, Changelings is character driven. Heck, even the planet Petaybee is a character. All of the characters are rich and jump right off of the page. I really liked the main characters of Ronan and Mural. Their power to shape-shift is pretty cool. As for the evil Professor Mabo, all she wants is knowledge.

Unfortunately, she is willing to break the rules society has set up to obtain the data she needs. With the planet in a constant state of flux, I am excited to learn what is going to happen. Will the new land mass be big? Will it be warm, lush and green? Will this frozen, water planet start to warn up? Will Petaybee make it know to the rest of the galaxy that it is alive? I am sure that these questions will be answered in the next books in this series.

Overall, Changelings by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is great beginning to a storyline that has a lot of promise. I can't wait to see what happens next.

I rated this book an 8½ out of 10.

good enough to buy book 2 and look for book 3

Slightly more YA formula driven than I expected-- still a good series, but not as good as dragonriders

It's mediocre and predictable. I haven't read any of the other Petaybee stories yet - maybe they'll get better.

I liked the idea of a sentient planet but all the terraformed planets in this future reality are flat, unidimensional places - an ice planet, a desert planet, a jungle planet - seriously? Is it impossible to terraform a planet that has many features, like Earth?

Amazing world building. I enjoyed the character development.