A review by ergative
Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle

3.75

A really solid planetary romance (in the sense of grand adventures on an alien planet), in which a human lands among aliens and must negotiate politics and culture and history and intrigue. It's one of those 1980s SF books that dived deep into lots of weird names with decorative punctuation to higlight the alienness, but it's free from a lot of the misogynistic bullshit that tends to be part and parcel of books from that era. Some thoughtful meditations on gender, some queernorm references, but mostly it's focused on telling a tale. It reminds me of nothing so much as CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books, although the commentary on integration and assimilating with aliens is not quite as sophisticated.