Dragon and Judge: The Fifth Dragonback Adventure (Dragonback) | Timothy Zahn

Dragon and Judge: The Fifth Dragonback Adventure (Dragonback) | Timothy Zahn | Decent Series

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Dragon and Judge: ...

	Dragon and Judge: The Fifth Dragonback Adventure (Dragonback) Timothy Zahn Starscape, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Orphaned at the age of three, brought up by his con man Uncle Virgil, Jack Morgan has done things that even in the future in space are unusual. But when he rescued Draycos, a dragon-like symbiont, from certain death, his life became a series of breathtaking adventures. With the help of Draycos, who can leap onto Jack?s back and become what looks like a tattoo, Jack has been doing everything he can to find out who ambushed the scout-fleet of Draycos?s people, the K?da and Shontine, leaving Draycos the sole survivor.. Now, just when Jack thinks he may finally be on the trail of the information he needs, he?s kidnapped by aliens, who ask him to be a judge for them, as, they reveal, his parents had once been.

Jack?s friend Alison Kayna, and her newly acquired K?da symbiont Taneem, are also kidnapped, and she is forced by two of the conspirators to open the booby-trapped safes from the K?da/Shontine scout fleet, to try and learn the rendezvous point of the larger fleet. With the help of Jack?s Uncle Virge and his ship Essenay, Jack and Draycos escape and rescue Alison, but they are unable to gain the information they desperately need to save the refugee fleet? and precious time is running out!

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Another Winner

In this the fifth book of the series, Zahn does something that he's very good at. He separates his characters and has his two stories running parallel. While Jack and Draycos are finding out what really happened to Jack's late parents, Alison and her symbiant find themselves back on the slave planet of Dragon and Slave: The Third Dragonback Adventure (Dragonback). Alison has been captured by The Malison Ring in order to help them obtain the information of where Draycos's people will arrive. Once again, the relationship between Draycos and Jack takes a new and unexpected turn. A must read.

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Decent Series

This entire series is vetted as for "young readers" and while it is not a complex, deep philosophical book it kept my interest through out and I am 54 so this is one I have shared with my thirteen year old and we have been equally satisfied with it.

Me because it was entertaining enough and not in anyway condenscending in tone and to my thirteen year old as the main character is fourteen. LOL.

I recommend the entire series

Best yet?

I think this may be my favorite of the books so far. It brought back some of the mystery that was missing from the last one.

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Always a great story

The fifth installment of Zahn's dragon series is great. I enjoyed reading it and I can't wait for the next one. Zahn tells one "independent" story in each book but also keeps the big story going.

Fast moving and fun -- engaging if fluffy space adventure

I've been reading Timothy Zahn's "Dragonback Adventures" series with a fair amount of enjoyment through the five books so far. It's a YA series. The hero is Jack Morgan, who has acquired a symbiotic companion, Draycos, a dragonlike being of an alien species, the K'Da. The K'Da can turn two-dimensional on the skin of an appropriate host. Indeed, they need to do so at least every six hours or so. Draycos was one of a vanguard group of K'Da as well as their hosts, the Shontine, who were fleeing an evil enemy in another galaxy. They had arranged for a colony in our Galaxy, but were ambushed on arrival. Draycos was the only survivor, and luckily for him Jack turned up -- luckier still, humans are acceptable hosts.

Over several books Jack and Draycos have been trying to track the humans who seem to be helping the bad aliens arrange to destroy the rest of the K'Da. They have by the by acquired an ally of sorts, Alison Kayna, a girl Jack's age (14 or 15) with a similar skillset to Jack's -- thief, hacker, safecracker, etc. And in the previous book they discovered a planet inhabited by a species much like the K'Da, but doomed to mindlessness by the lack of suitably intelligent hosts. Alison is now host to a female named Taneem. (So it would seem -- possibly -- that love interests are in place for both Jack and Draycos, though no real moves in that direction have been taken.)

In this book the quartet head to a planet where Jack's Uncle Virge had stashed something mysterious in a safe-deposit box. No sooner does Jack arrive, however, that he is shanghaied by a group of aliens and taken to their rural home to act as "Jupa", or Judge-Paladin -- to adjudicate tribal disputes, basically. It turns out he smells like their previous Jupas -- who turn out to have been Jack's long-dead parents. Jack cooperates, while he and Draycos sense a mystery concerning an abandoned mine -- and possibly concerning Jack's parents' death.

Meanwhile Alison retrieves the contents of the safe-deposit box, and is immediately kidnapped by bad guys who have been expecting someone to take an interest in that box. Rather implausibly, what they really want is a super-skilled safecracker, to open a safe from Draycos's ship -- that may contain information about the arrival of the rest of the K'Da. In other words, these are the bad guys. Why a 14 year old girl is the best safecracker available to them is a mystery never revealed. It turns out the safe is back on the planet from a couple of books before where Jack freed some slaves -- and Alison finds herself, against her will, guilted into trying to free more slaves.

The book (as with all in the series) has great gulps of implausibility and downright silliness. But it is also fast-moving, fun, with engaging main characters. I find the whole series pretty enjoyable fluff.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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