Restoree by Anne McCaffrey

I read Restoree by Anne McCaffrey for the nth time.  I first read it as a teen, I think, and enjoyed it then.  It's aged well for me.

Sara, the main character, from Earth, is abducted by a nasty, rather faceless alien species, and is rescued by another group of aliens who are, on the surface at least, very human-like.  (This is not a very widely-scoped book - it deals with the situations it covers well, but it leaves a lot of the world-building incomplete.) Anyway,  Sara ends up on Lothar (the home of her rescuers), coming out of a period of unawareness, finding herself as an attendant to a mentally-absent man in a very untenable situation.  She ends up helping to end a nasty planetary political and military crisis and falling in love and marrying Harlan, the soon-to-be planetary Regent.

I found myself impressed with how subversive it really is.  It was written in 1967, McCaffrey's first full-length novel, and was written for a specific purpose.  "“Restoree” was a once-off jab at the way women were portrayed in science-fiction. ... I have no need to write a sequel since it served its purpose of an intelligent, survivor-type woman as the protagonist of an S-F story." Sara sure is one kick-ass female protagonist.  She doesn't beat anyone up or perpetrate violence (which seems to be seen as a necessary component of a kick-ass heroine these days - playing like the boys), but she becomes a successful high-stakes player in an unfamiliar culture with a lot of false cognates and an often-distant support network, which is plenty kick-ass for me.

The sexual mores are also radical for a book designed for 1967 main-stream America.  She posits that Lothar is a fully-functioning, highly-moral society that does not appreciate the value of virginity; in fact Harlan is surprised and a little dismayed that Sara is a virgin at 21.  Lothar's conditions have been such that the population needs to be constantly refreshed, which produced a society that prizes lots of kids, doesn't ask who the father is, and has matrilineal inheritance and succession - except for at the highest level of planetary Warlord. 

Now this book would not pass the Bechdel Test, does not have very many women (in fact the only women I can think of are Sara, Lady Fara, Sara's maid (who is named), another lady who tries to cut Sara off in her political maneuverings, and Sara's fellow attendants at the asylum where she woke up), and does not mention women's role in the larger society.  So not necessarily feminist in the larger sense, but well done for its time, and not a total wash for the early 21st century.
 
I've seen "Restoree" listed as one of the first Science Fiction Romances.  It does have a romance as a strong theme (obviously), but it is one of the more important storylines, not the most important.  So it works for me as a SF Romance when so many don't because it's SF first, and romance second.

The limited world-building also works for this book.  It gives the book an intimacy that goes along with Sara's POV, which is, of necessity, of limited political and cultural knowledge.  You really see and understand what she sees and understands, and the amount of meaningful inference is minimal.