Summers at Castle Auburn
Sharon Shinn
Ace, 355 page
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Coriel Halsing is the illegitimate child of a noble line. Nine months of the year are spent with her grandmother,
a village wisewoman and healer to whom she is apprenticed, and the three months of summer at Castle Auburn, where
she lives the life of a highborn courtier. Strong-willed as she is, she sometimes finds it difficult to fit in,
and often would rather study herbs and spells than manners and deportment. But she has a staunch ally in her adored
older sister Elisandra (with whose betrothed, handsome Prince Bryan, she's infatuated), and a firm friend in Bryan's
cousin Kent. And her Uncle Jaxon--a dashing, mercurial man who has made a fortune capturing and selling aliora,
a mysterious race of magical beings who are in great demand as bodyservants--can always be relied upon to get her
out of trouble.
As Coriel grows older, she begins to perceive darker currents beneath the idyllic surface of life at Castle Auburn.
Handsome Bryan is in fact shallow and cruel, and Elisandra's apparent tranquillity masks deep unhappiness. Kent
is consumed with unrequited love, and Jaxon's pursuit of the aliora has begun to change him in strange ways. As
for the aliora themselves, Coriel finds it less and less possible to close her eyes to the cruelty of their enslavement.
As Bryan's and Elisandra's marriage day approaches, personal and political tensions tighten toward the breaking
point, with Coriel in the middle of it all.
There's not a great deal of depth to this tale. Shinn, who usually creates complex backgrounds for her books, has
settled here for a fairly generic medievalism, and hasn't fleshed even this out with very much detail. The suffering
of the aliora and their ambiguous bond to the human beings they serve are sensitively evoked, but it's never really
clear how they fit into the world. And though there are dark themes--Bryan's casual cruelty, Jaxon's growing obsession
with the aliora, the steely will beneath Elisandra's apparent passivity--Shinn only skims them, keeping the tone
of the book resolutely light.
But she's a gifted storyteller, with the ability to create vivid characters and believable relationships; and these,
together with the book's smooth prose and expert pacing, make Summers at Castle Auburn a fast, absorbing
read. Coriel's gradual awakening to the discordances of court life, the shedding of her adolescent infatuation
and her growing need to question what she has always taken for granted, are nicely rendered, as is the main romantic
thread. And the happy ending, if a bit predictable, is just as it should be. It's an enjoyable confection from
an author who is capable of much more.
Copyright © 2001 Victoria Strauss
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