I love reading Anne McCaffrey. This one blends perfectly her mix of science and fantasy (my preference). Sometimes it has some dialogue that is a little too juvenile for my taste, but what the heck! If you read the first book about Petaybee, you'll want to read this one, too! My next step is the sequel.

Definitely not as good as the original series.

These 10-yr-olds think and act like 13-14 year olds. While this is partially explained in the introduction, it is not emphasized enough to make the twins' age believable. Beyond that, this is a good book that McCaffrey and Scarborough fans will enjoy.

I have not read a booking in this series for many years, but remember enjoying the previous books. This is no exception-makes me wish our planet could participate in its own upkeep.

Fascinating

I have long speculated that our Earth was a sentient organism. This book takes that idea to a whole new level! I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Anne McCaffrey is an author I always enjoy reading. I really loved the way this series started although I felt it lost a bit of its appeal as the books went on.I do find it to be a very fascinating world with great characters but I am not sure I love the formula of the story telling. But I still quite like it.

So, take a set of twins - Ronan Born for Water Shongili, and Mural Monster Slayer Shongili - that can shape change into seals, just like their father, then a sentient planet that is slowly trying to give birth to an island, an Otter that thinks it's cool to be friends with the twins, and a scientist that discovers them, and kidnaps the Otter's family, in the hopes of luring said twins so she can study them!

What you end up with, are parents that realise that their, now eight year old, twins have become too adventurous for their own good, but too young to realise the dangers they could face, and so they need to send them off world, into the safe keeping of their friend Marmie, where they could explore somewhere very different to their planet, and while they are young enough to be able to do so.

They go with Marmie to her home, a space station, where they meet young children their own age, and learn about other planets in their system.

For three years they stay there, becoming good friends with Ke-ola, a boy whose people were originally Island people on Old Earth, but had become like the twins' people, the IP's: the Inconvenient Peoples.

Ke-ola's people were moved - more than once - in order that the Company who owned their lands could access whatever minerals were found there.

Ke-ola teaches them about his people, and shows them holo's of how beautiful their first home had been, with laughing, dancing people, enjoying the sunny islands with an abundance of all types of plants and flowers.

He then shows them the place they had been moved to next - a colder, heavier, world where their life is much harder, and their traditional flora and fauna struggle to survive.

Next, they are shown the grim ecobubbles, where his family were living now, and the contrast from their home world couldn't have been more different!

At their school, a new teacher arrives, a Professor Mabo, who's grandson, Rory, is one of their school friends. She's not nice to Rory, her family, or the other children, but tries to be friendly with Ronan, ignoring Mural, until, one day in a dissection class, Mabo comes up behind Mural, making her jump, and cut her finger.

Ronan sees Mabo take a tissue that has Murals blood on it, and wonders why, only to find out, when the twins try to rescue a Honokuan sea turtle, that Mabo was going to experiment on. It came from the same world as Ke-ola, who joined with the twins in the rescue attempt.

Unfortunately, Mabo had known they would try this, and snuck up to the twins, and pushed them into the tank, where they immediately changed into seals.

Ke-ola had escaped the room and raced off to get Marmie and her security people, who turned up just in time to rescue the twins. It turned out that Mabo was one of the scientists who had tried to kidnap the twins on Petaybee!

In the meantime, on Petaybee, Sean, the twins' father, had gone to look at the volcanic mass that the planet had been slowly extruding in the middle of the ocean, but was caught in a blast that knocked him out. Just as everything was turning black, he sees some moving lights where there shouldn't be any.

Marmie takes the twins back to Petaybee, where they learn that Sean is missing. Ke-ola had come with them, as well as the turtle, and they volunteered to go with the twins, to see if Sean could be found.

When, with the help of their friend Otter, now named Sky, and his family, and their cousins the sea otters, they find the place of moving lights, where the sea otters tell them there lives deep sea otters and, only after promising these mysterious creatures that they'd keep them a secret, did their father suddenly appear among them, just waking up, and thinking he had only just been knocked out.

As their mother, Yana, and their friends Marmie, Johnny, and the crew of the yatch, manage to get them out of the sea, they realise that Petaybee is ready to give birth to so much mass, that they were in danger of being killed.

Ke-ola, though, has a plan and, through the history of his people, dances and sings, then gets everyone else to join in with him, and this helps Petaybee to give birth, in a much better, more controlled manner, than she had been doing. She gives birth to an island, one that she planned for Ke-ola, and his family, to live on.

I did enjoy this book, and loved most of it, though I couldn't give it the five stars I might have done, because there were times throughout it, that I actually got a little irritated with the tone used.

I know it's the story of the twins but, quite frankly, there were sections where I felt we were expected to read it as if we were young children ourselves. This just annoyed me as, although the twins are young, they were born aware, and they were much more forward than their peer group, so using an almost baby-talk kind of tone, felt wrong to me. It didn't match to Anne's usual standards for me.

No plot. Boorriinngg!!

Changelings was pretty good, but as I had thought it was the first in a series only to find out it followed another trilogy that came first, I found it a bit confusing. I'll need to read the other trilogy and then read this one again.

This is not my favorite Anne McCaffrey, but it was interesting. It was a bit predictable and hard for me to connect with the character and get lost in the story, but it was still clever and interesting. An intriguing science-fictional take on shape-changing myths and folktale creatures.

I really enjoyed this book in the beginning. The characters and world it's set on are quite intriguing. It just seemed to lose momentum the last half and the ending was a bit anticlimactic to me but I can see how it's to set it up for more books in the series.

Anne McCaffrey is another author I struggle to put down once started, so this has been a reading Sunday to round off my holiday.

This is a new Petaybee book about the Selkie twin children of Yana Maddock and selkie Sean Shongli and how they link with otters and other parts of the sentient planet. I loved Sky the otter.