Pretty good. I couldn't shake the thought, though, that it had a very modern sensibility. Crispin's developmental task in the book, so to speak, was to rethink and challenge everything he had been taught about his place in society. Well, he is forced to do so because the steward is trying to kill him: it's change or die. He runs away from his home and falls in with a minstrel/spy, who insists that Crispin start challenging his old patterns of thought (I must do this because my lord/the lord's steward/the Church tells me to). Mmm: what I mean is, the events of the book absolutely force Crispin to positions which we admire in the 20th century: I am responsible only to/for myself, I have freedom of movement, my money is my own, I have the right to assemble with whom I choose and the right to political freedom. I follow only my own conscience. The only way Avi could accomplish this, of course, was to set things up so that if Crispin clung to the medieval mindset, the mindset he'd lived under his whole life, he would be murdered without mercy.