After a slower start while I tried to remember events and characters, I found that I absolutely couldn't put The Children of Kings down.

http://allbookedup-elena.blogspot.ca/2015/01/the-children-of-kings-marion-zimmer... ( )

This was a First Reads win from Goodreads, an Advance reader's copy (so there may be changes before it reaches publication in March).

In some ways what a wonderful concept: immortality for our beloved authors by having chosen friend continue the adventures in the author's chosen lands. I mean, which of us would not give our right hands..or a fingernail or two, anyway, for a new Jane Austen novel? It is never fair that the authors we love die, as Bradley did in 1999.

And in writing The Children of Kings, Deborah J. Ross has said she has gone back to previous Bradley sources, to her conversations with Bradley, and so on, in an attempt to stay true to what this Darkover novel would have been if written by Bradley herself.

Does she manage this? Well, could anyone? I don't think so.

But it is a good read, with the requisite adventures and search for self and reconciliation and use of laren, and starstones and clashing cultural mores and all that. After a slow start I found that I had fully entered into the various interlocking tales and keep reading (and not sleeping) to see how everything turned out. (without spoiling this for others, let me say that everything turns out very predictably). ( )