I'm unavoidably rereading this through a haze of nostalgia, but I still think it's one of the top YA fantasies around. Pierce covers a lot of ground in a small number of pages, using an episodic format to great effect. There's a slightly overused tendency to resort to deus ex machina to move things along quicker, and the bad guys tend towards the uncomplicated and irredeemable, but the good guys are convincingly flawed and human. Dear God, though, what were the people who did the cover art for the 1983 edition thinking?