I’ve read half of the Pip and Flinx books.  This one was excellent.  I really like Alan Dean Foster’s style of writing.  In the first seven books, Flinx has grown from a young boy to a man in his twenties.  Traveling around the universe in his personal space ship in a quest to find out who he is.  The start of this story finds him on some back water world, trying to find peace and a quite.  His ever evolving talent has taken a turn for the worse, the on set of terrible headaches, whenever he is around too many people.

  While minding his own business, and trying to finish his meal, he attracts the attention of the head of a large local trading house.  More to the point, Pip, the flying minidrag, catches the man’s eye.  The merchant Coerlis has made up his mind he needs the mindrag for his personal zoo.  Flinx refuses and makes a run for it.  After getting back to his ship he orders it to get him out of there and head for the next habitual planet.  After a long time the ship comes out of space-plus to orbit an unnamed planet.  A planet whose land mass is nearly covered in enormous trees, hundreds of meters tall.  Finding one of the few landing spots, Flinx brings his shuttle down to explore this extraordinary world. 

  Flinx quickly learns this world is an extremely dangerous place.  At every turn the flora or fauna can be lethal.  After taking a misstep and finding himself in the clutches of a man-eating plant he is saved by a couple of intelligent creatures.  The two mastiff sized creatures debate rather Flinx is a person or not, but decide to save him anyway.  After which our hero finds the two creatures are part of a group of six.  Three humans and three of the intelligent creatures.  Flinx agrees to help the group return to their home tree.  During their journey Flinx discovers many secrets about the forest world and comes to bond with the humans. 

  One morning they are surprised by Coerlis and his hired thugs.  They force the natives to lead them back to the shuttle.  As Coerlis looses one after another of this thugs he decides it’s time to just take the minidrag and go.  Just as Flinx is about to be pushed to his death help unexpected arrives.  However, the help is not what Flinx would call good, out of the frying pan and into the fire, as the old saying goes.  (Here I won’t spoil it for you.) 

  The book is really great and I highly recommend reading them.  Make sure you look up online the chronological order to read the series in.  I don’t think Alan Dean Foster wrote them in order.  I do find a mistake or two in this fashion, some skill Flinx learned and then didn’t have or mention ever again.  But still an excellent series!