Kagan did Warrior Cats before Warrior Cats did Warrior Cats

Not without it's issues (Mary Sue character), but I still hold a place in my heart for it. ( )

I'll admit upfront this is a nostalgic favorite. I think it's also very good.

Early in her career, Lt. Uhura met a young diplomat from the world of Eeiauo. The two women bonded over music, singing, and the songs of their respective peoples and cultures. The graceful, catlike Sunfall of Ennian even shares songs with Uhura, and the Old Tongue they are sung in, that are not to shared except with other bards,

Years later, Uhura is now communications officer on the USS Enterprise, which is on a mission of mercy to Eeiauo, where a terrible plague has broken out. The infected individuals become weak, their fur (or hair, as they make the unhappy discovery it also affects humans), become stiff and achy, fall into comas, and die. One of those dying is Uhura's old friend, Sunfall.

McCoy and others are on the surface working directly with Eeiauoan medical personnel. Chapel is among the humans who have fallen ill.

Spock works out that the Eeiauoans can't be native to their current world. Uhura has reached the same conclusion from reexamining the songs Sunfall taught her. Together they set to work figuring out where their homeworld is. The Eeiauoans can't, or rather won't, help them, because they left their homeworld for what the consider deeply shameful reasons. They don't even want it being said that there was a homeworld.

McCoy and others on the planet look for a successful treatment or cure. Kirk and the Enterprise, with Spock and Uhura still working the information they have to locate the homeworld, head off to find it.
We get alternating sections following McCoy and his colleagues, and, when they find the planet, Kirk, Uhura, Spock, Chekov, the interim Medical Director Evan Wilson, and Sulu beam down to the planet to make contact. What follows is a wonderful tale of worldbuilding, a very interesting alien culture, and the unraveling of a very knotty problem.

The natives on the Eeiauoans' homeworld, the Savaoans, are also deeply ashamed of the events that led to the exile of the Eeiauoans. They are not going to talk, even to save lives, until the landing party figures out the reason they won't talk. It's complex and fascinating and frustrating.

The ending is quite satisfying, and then there's a sort of epilogue, that you may like or loathe.

I bought this book. ( )

Really liked this one! I feel like I'm having a good run of Trek novels right now. I really liked that this introduced another feliniform race (besides Snarl's race) and that it spent a huge amount of time on their culture. It feels authentic in a way that most of the representations of alien cultures to this point haven't in the novels. I'm not such a huge fan of how we keep having to introduce Harry Mudd esque trickster characters. Evan Wilson was just fine, and I really appreciated that she wasn't posed in competition with Uhura or anyone else, but I didn't feel like she added that much to the story ; it would have been more exciting, in my opinion, if her character had been melded with Uhura's, and Uhura got to be the daring adventurer for once!

The author does a great job capturing the voice of the characters, but some of the major plot points were pretty weak. A fun space adventure, but I doubt I will read it again. Real nice to see Uhura being a central figure of a novel. ( )