The characters turn out to be fairly interesting, as do the alien cultures and alien characters Crispin describes.
Plot-wise the story seems to meander just a bit, in order to hit all of the necessary elements for, I assume, the remainder of the series, but overall the flight to higher authority to resolve a dispute is definitely a different concept from the science fiction I normally read.
Thematically, this is mostly setup stuff from what I can tell, setting up the main character, Mahree, as someone special, honorable, wise and important, despite her rather tender years, something of a "fantasy" in the original sense of the word.
Not bad, though there doesn't seem to be much here for the adult reader. For more mature readers, I highly recommend Crispin's Time For Yesterday from the Star Trek universe which works well on its own, though her Yesterday's Son is also a pretty good novel and worth reading first for perspective on Time.
