I was in the mood for something anti-sexist, to cleanse my palate (as it were) after Beginning Operations and The Prisoner of Zenda. While Five Hundred Years After is certainly not sexist, all the same it didn’t quite reach that annoyance. So I grabbed Patricia C. Wrede’s The Raven Ring out of the library, which fit the bill admirably.
The Raven Ring is a small, well-crafted tale of adventure among culture clash. Eleret Salven is a young woman from a culture where all people are trained as warriors; her mother has been killed while in the army, and Eleret journeys into the city to pick up her possessions, according to their traditions. She finds herself rather a fish out of water in a city where gender roles are strictly differentiated; she also learns that someone is after her mother’s ring, and will stop at nothing, etc. (Technically speaking, the Fate of the World is, possibly, at stake, but it never really feels that way, which is rather refreshing.)
This is not a terribly novel or ambitious book, but it is a solid, entertaining, non-guilty-pleasure way to pass a few hours and shake the last bits of annoyance at sexist books.