Cut the ''a''s from the title and what's left sums up this novel perfectly. The authors stall in getting their major theme of exploited children under way, and they unconvincingly muddle it with precious goings-on among Acorna's three adopted miner dads, sentimentalized little victims, shady planetside entrepreneurs and a stock villain. Acorna's horn can detect poisons and nuzzle sick and wounded humans back to health, so she becomes the savior of Kezdet, a Dickensian planet full of abused children slaving in mines, match factories and brothels.

After three grungy Terran bachelor asteroid miners find the silver-curled, long-faced baby and name her ''Acorna'' for the strange protuberance growing from her forehead, the story gallops into a gulch of sentimentality. World Building Setting Set in Anne McCaffrey's Federated Sentient Planets Universe. she has created the bestselling Acorna series focusing on the adventures of the brave. Also known as Anne McCaffrey's The Unicorn Girl: The Illustrated Adventures and Anne McCaffrey's The Unicorn Girl: An Illustrated Novel. Beloved by millions of readers, Anne McCaffrey is one of science. Collaborating again with Ball (after Partnership), McCaffrey opens promisingly in the far future with charming doomed unicorn beings who seal their infant into a survival pod, hoping someone will save her after they choose to die in space rather than in a grisly Khlevii torture cell. Anne McCaffrey's The Unicorn Girl (1997) (Anthology) with stories by Mickey Zucker Reichert, Jody Lynn Nye and Roman A.

The vein of invention McCaffrey worked so effectively in her Pern series seems to have been exhausted.

Anne mccaffrey acorna series