Tristan grew up a human among aliens. Now he must used his alienness to survive among humans.

Tristan isn't quite two when the transport, in which he and his mother are traveling to join his fighter pilot father, is captured by the masuki: fierce, non-human slavers. Tristan and his mother, Darcie, escape in a lifepod, but it carries them to Ganwold, a primitive planet controlled by the enemy Dominion. Because the masuk pirates jumped the transport several years forward in time, they cannot expect a rescue, and Tristan grows to young manhood in hiding among an alien race, the ganan.

Tristan is barely eighteen when Darcie contracts a lingering, life-threatening illness. To help her, he and his gan "brother," Pulou, set out on a quest to seek Tristan's father, Lujan Sergey. In one of the Dominion colonies they are captured and turned over to the Sector General, Mordan Renier, who uses Tristan as a bargaining chip in an ttempt to invade Sostis, the homeworld he lost years before in the war. Lujan, now an admiral, and commander of the special forces, must counter Renier's impending attack, realizing he could lose the family he's just learned is still alive.

One military family's saga, and a large-scale epic of war in space, begins with the odyssey of Ganwold's Child.

"Ganwold's Child . . . falls within that SF subgenre that can only be called military bildundsroman . . . but [Read] subverts and transforms that subgenre at every turn. . . . As for the military speak, the fact is that unlike most writers who toss that stuff in for fake authenticity, [Read] was career military and she uses that language because that's the way military people express their military ideas. . . . This novel is exemplary for showing how the effective military mind really works--you'll find no romantic military nonsense here." --Orson Scott Card