Rite of Passage, by Alexei Panshin

Mia Havero is a teenage girl living on a spaceship. After Earth was destroyed, humanity remains on several very large spaceships and about a hundred colonized planets. The spaceships have a high standard of living, strictly controlled population, and high technology. The planet colonies are nasty, brutish, and short... well, small, anyway. They have a low standard of living and low technology, as the spaceships don't share scientific knowledge, but only trade it in tiny snippets for goods. Spaceship people despise the colonists, calling them Mudeaters, and don't tend to leave their ships...

...except when they're fourteen. Then they get dumped on a random planet, where they have to survive for a month. If they survive - and about a quarter of them don't - they return as an adult. This is presented to them as a way to keep the population in check; it's only discussed as a meaningful rite of passage when they're actually training to do it.

Mia doesn't see any problem with this or with any other ship customs. Her adored father, a politician, always has wise explanations for everything, and Mia internalizes them. Of course the Mudeaters are so backward, they're not even people. Of course it's fine to do population control by dumping teenagers on a planet where a bunch of them will die. As she gets older and begins preparing for her Trial, she starts getting exposed to other opinions. They don't make much of a dent... until she actually does get dumped on a planet.

This book was written in 1968 and won the Nebula, but is now out of print. It's less dated and more interesting than quite a bit of SF from the same period that is still in print. In particular, while it seems to have been written as both a homage to and a critique of Heinlein's juveniles, it also has quite a bit in common with Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory, which did not win the Nebula but did win the Hugo this year.

Mia is an unusually flawed character for the protagonist of 1968 science fiction. She's smart and competent, but extremely socially anxious, arrogant, rigid, and bad at relating to people. People often don't like her, and it's not because they're jealous. Even more surprisingly, her perfect, wise, wonderful father turns out to not be quite the perfect, wise, always-right Heinlein mentor... or rather, he really is a Heinlein mentor, except he's written by Panshin rather than Heinlein, and Panshin doesn't think his ideas are good. The aspects of the Trail that seem particularly insane, like that the only way to get picked up is to set off a signal contained in a tiny box and too bad if the box gets lost, broken, or stolen, turn out to not be the author not thinking it through, but a depiction of how the ship society is deeply fucked up and broken.

Most of the book is a character study of Mia as she grows up in her society, focusing on her day-to-day life and how she matures (or doesn't.) It's very well-done and enjoyable, with some Growing up Weightless vibes. The Trial itself is only the last quarter of the book.

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