I am disappointed

I just finished reading Camouflage, which supposedly won a Nebula, but I'm finding it hard to believe. The story mostly follows a changeling alien that wanders the oceans masquerading as various animals for millions of years, only coming out onto land to investigate humans in the 1930s. It spends quite a lot of time trying to understand and imitate us before it decides to start looking for where it came from. When a team of scientists unearths a strange artifact from the ocean, the alien's naturally on the spot.

The actual writing was ably executed — nothing spectacular but good. The beginning was interesting, and main character sympathetic, but the ending was foreseeable about a mile off. Unfortunately, the best part of the book was the chapter I read in the bookstore, in which the alien ends up stuck in the Bataan Death March, trying to understand this new aspect of humanity. In the end it is supposed to learn to love, which is carefully developed over a whole two scenes. It is just assumed that the immortal, multiple PhD holding, repeatedly married (and currently young and sexy) alien naturally only learns to love immediately upon meeting a middle-aged, slightly pudgy and admittedly desperate scientist. I'm willing to bet that it's old astronomy department was full of them. It's all so fast and superficial that we never see anything special, and what starts out as a story of an alien learning what it means to be human ends as an indulgent fantasy. Apparently acknowledging human suffering is so rare in sci-fi that it warrants an award even if the story is otherwise lacking.