The Spirit Ring, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Megan just picked up a secondhand paperback, and Bujold is one of my favorite authors, so I immediately gave it a try.  Imaginative, but maybe a little rushed, with a strong sense of place and likeable characters; but it's lacking the deftness of later Bujold and the romance angle feels artificial and is the most rushed of several overly hurried elements.

Recommended for fun light reading, though.  And checking out the notes on research at the back of the book was also pretty cool, in that the disparate elements of the story can almost all be concisely and accurately sourced -- proof that derivative fiction is not necessarily inferior to original.