This book takes up pretty much immediately after its predecessor, Little Fuzzy, finishes and continues the story of the (now legally protected as) sapient species Fuzzy Fuzzy Holloway on the colony world Zarathustra. The jacket blurb on my edition was actually misleading, hinting at an existential threat to the species that didn’t turn up until pretty late in the book, and was then resolved pretty quickly and without much drama.
I was somewhat bemused throughout the book by the treatment of the Fuzzies by the Humans. Despite repeatedly stating that they were sentient, they were often treated like pets, although I’m not sure if this is was deliberately done by the author to show confusion in the colonists’ minds or was an issue that Piper had.
One thing that I found quite quaint was the very mid-twentieth century attitudes on display, partially in the treatment of courting and women (not as bad as some, since it actually allowed women to work in serious jobs) and very much in the fact that everyone seemed to stop in the early evening for a cocktail hour. It somehow felt quite colonial, in the British Empire sense, and not really like a frontier colony world at all, but it was charming, in its own way.
Charming is a good word to describe the book as a whole, really. There’s little sense of threat and the whole thing just feels like an extended footnote to the previous volume. I still found it enjoyable though and one thing that I did like was how it rehabilitated the villains from the previous book. In that, the Company that ran the planet had a vested interest in proving the Fuzzies non-sapient, since otherwise they would lose their claim to the planet, but now that that has happened, the company brass shrug and just get on with dealing with the aftermath, and are portrayed much more sympathetically than before.
In summary, the book was enjoyable and fun, but by no means essential reading for fans of Little Fuzzy.
