This was one of my favourite series as an adolescent - I thought it much better than the Magician series it spun off, thought I liked that too. Anyway, it's been decades since I read it last, but I still find it enjoyable. There's the odd bit of cringe, for example the lengthy paragraph detailing Mara's physical appearance which is one bare step up from her examining herself in a mirror, but for the most part it's held up very well. That's due, I think, to the protagonist.

I read a lot of fantasy as a kid. After a while the characters can blur together, and lots of them - too many, it seemed sometimes - were warriors or wizards or so on. To this day reading about battles doesn't do that much for me. And attached to these stories of war and magic were women, sometimes, and they were princesses or some such, but they were often on the sidelines by virtue of their tendency not to hack at things with swords. And along comes Mara, who'd planned to spend her life in a temple, but her family dies and suddenly she's the heir to a great house, and what saves her? Trade deals and understanding social traditions, making alliances and out-thinking all her opponents. She's absolutely the centre of the story, and that story makes no apology for prioritising her political nature. She was a very different sort of heroine, basically - one who spent long hours on balance sheets and appreciated art and liked going for coffee-equivalent and chats with the leader of the local insect species. Fantasy being published today has more characters like her, but at the time, in the fantasy that was available to me, she tended to stand out.