July 30, 2005
Dragon and Soldier by Timothy Zahn
This is the second book I read for the Endeavour Award. It's the second book of an open-ended series about young Jack Morgan who in the first book (Dragon and Thief which I have not read) seems to have teamed up with a K'da named Draycos. The K'da are aliens with two modes of operation. They look like what we'd call a dragon when operating autonomously, but have to spend some portion of their time attached to a host in which mode they appear two-dimensional, almost like a tattoo on the host's body. Jack is an extremely independent though somewhat amoral (in the sense that he's been operating as a con man with his (now deceased, though still around as an AI) uncle for most of his life) fourteen-year-old while Draycos is an adult "Warrior Poet" who follows a strict moral code.
I enjoyed the premise that I've just laid out, and the characters were well enough drawn that it was fun getting to know them better through the course of the book. The plotting left something to be desired, though, with the whole rationale of the events in the book feeling contrived. Maybe I was just missing something from not having read the first book.