This is my regularly scheduled social media post about how I think Janet Kagan's Star Trek novel Uhura's Song is very good and people should read it if they like Star Treks. It's about cat people and a deadly pandemic (for Reasons I've read it a few times recently). It probably contributed enormously to young me taking the difference between sharing culture and appropriating it seriously when I heard that laid out, because a lot of the interaction between characters in this novel involves professionals trained in making first contact with other cultures carefully navigating boundaries along those lines (with cat people). No real spoilers, but a major source of conflict is the question of "what happens when someone tells you that they won't help you save countless lives at the cost of breaching their cultural taboos," and this not dealt with by deciding those taboos are childish and backwards and need to be broken, but by recognizing that a person with the authority to enforce them is doing so in bad faith and supporting the choices of people within that culture who are also impacted. A secondary, connected theme is how adults can hurt young people in their care by deciding it's too much for them to know what's in their baggage, but that they have to carry it anyway.
There are great descriptions of fruit and a good understanding of what little children would get up to if they had prehensile tails and claws.
If you google it and see a bunch of nerds talking about how it's Fandom Controversial and Cringe because it features a Mary Sue, that's fair if your definition of "Mary Sue" is "original female character who could have carried her own series," which is the case for a lot of nerds. Probably worth noting that the name and solid concept of a Mary Sue originated in Trek fandom, back in 1970-something when people were complaining about individual works of fanfiction in commercially-published magazines.
Kagan wrote back to eight-year-old Ring, who loved the character, and told me she was inspired by her late mother. Also she sent me a photo of her cat. Cool lady, I wish she was still with us.
one thing I REALLY dig is the exploration of what "being trained in making first contact" looks like beyond the Prime Directive, which does happen in the TV series but with the pacing of a novel can linger a little more on how it would realistically probably involve a lot of just sitting with people as guests in their home and carefully learning how to be polite.