Enchantress from the Stars

Blurb

Enchantress from the Stars is a young-adult science fiction novel by Sylvia Engdahl, published by Atheneum Books in 1970. It was her first or second book and the first of five set in the Anthropology Service universe. Its sequel The Far Side of Evil features the same heroine, Elana, and the two are sometimes called the Elana series, although the sequel is quite different in tone.
Enchantress was a runner up for the 1971 Newbery Medal, the American Library Association award to the previous year's best children's book by a U.S. author. It won the 1990 Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association as the best English-language children's book that did not win a major award when it was originally published twenty years earlier. The award is named for the mythical bird phoenix, which is reborn from its ashes, to suggest the book's rise from obscurity. A new American hardcover edition was issued by Walker and Company in 2001 with a foreword by Lois Lowry and afterword by the author. Next year it was a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year Award in the Rediscovery category.