A review by sherwoodreads
Thunderlord by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Back in the seventies, the Darkover series was important to so many of us. It was a series in which the agency of the female characters mattered; there were wars, yes, as in so many fantasies, but the psi connections, and the Free Amazons, etc, paralleled our own struggles to break the pink curtain between competent heroes with agency and female "problems" or prizes .

Deborah Ross has inherited the series, and I think she does a superlative job. For one thing, I think her prose is better than Marion's, and also her characters a bit more complex. And yet she perfectly captures the Darkover 'feel' in this volume, featuring two very close sisters who travel over the mountains so that one can marry the Scathfell Lord--feuding enemy of the Aldarans--which marriage will basically save the Rockraven family, who has been on hard times every since the Stormqueen days.

But fierce weather and then a bandit raid interrupt, and the plans are thrown into chaos. The loyalty of the sisters, the questions of laran and genetics, the feud and its expectations, all gallop toward a tense climax. The sisters find their own way to resolution, completing a very satisfactory tale. It's lovely to revisit Darkover with these new stories--I can't wait to see what Ross does next.