At Amberleaf Fair - Phyllis Ann Karr
Dec. 9th, 2022 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxThanks to osprey_archer, I was able to jump on the bandwagon and read Phyllis Ann Karr's At Amberleaf Fair, a low-stakes fantasy mystery that flings you head-first into a highly detailed, esoteric fantasy society of Karr's own invention, some details of which are explored in depth— the question of how food allergies would work in a magical world where food (and non-food items) can be transformed into other kinds of food, but do eventually transform back, is key to the plot— and others are thrown out with a sense of no time for explanations! figure it out or don't, but keep up! (At one point, in an attempt to connect the dots between the heavy use of tree-based metaphors - children are called "saplings", the elderly "wear harvest colors" - and the fact it's never explicitly stated that the characters are human, I was like, are they Ents?? or otherwise tree-based beings???, BUT considering the number of references to objects carved out of wood, I really hope they aren't. Anyway, pretty sure they are human, for reasons discussed later.)
The tl;dr version of the plot is that Torin, a toymaker with latent magical abilities, finds himself at the heart of two mysteries— his wizard brother's sudden illness, and a stolen jewel— and approximately one and a half love triangles (a love pentagon?), but also everything is significantly less dramatic than that combination of things might suggest. The perspective shifts between Torin; Dilys, a storyteller involved in the love pentagon; and Alrathe, the judge (kind of a cross between a detective and an arbitrator, here) hired to solve the mystery of the missing jewel.
I'd somehow gotten the impression, before reading this, that the judge was going to be the antagonist and, idk, frame Torin for the theft? I was incorrect! The judge was definitely my favorite character, not least because they were canonically nonbinary/non-gendered— Karr carefully avoids gendered language when describing them (although she doesn't actually use gender-neutral "they," I am, here, because it's significantly more convenient) and at one point, a character trips over himself to figure out whether to refer to the judge by the honorific "Father" or "Mother" before the judge says they prefer the gender-neutral title "Cousin." I'm also just very charmed by a fantasy novel with a legal system, albeit a curious, individualized/ad hoc one.
The wildest bit of world-building is the implication that this book takes place In Our Future (references to "ancient records" that appear to describe the modern world, and suggest some sort of apocalyptic population loss; someone says "the ancients may have had something like this" and goes on to describe fireworks), and this future involves fantasy semi-communism. ("Ancient records indicated that long ago folk had considered land a thing which could be owned"; while this principle no longer holds, "even now such buildings as archives, skyreading towers, and in many towns certain specialized crafthouses ... were sealed when vacant, to be assigned by a panel of judges and craft comrades to qualified claimants.") This was one way in which the world-building gave me a sense of deja vu that I ultimately traced to the half-remembered Lois Lowry books from my childhood— the other is that, like in Lowry's Gathering Blue, this society's naming conventions start with one-syllable names for children that get longer with age and rank— although I assume this is just a case of convergent evolution.
ETA: linking to the other reviews in the book chain ofskygiants [x] —> osprey_archer [x] —> me —> chestnut_pod [x]
osprey_archer, I was able to jump on the bandwagon and read Phyllis Ann Karr's At Amberleaf Fair, a low-stakes fantasy mystery that flings you head-first into a highly detailed, esoteric fantasy society of Karr's own invention, some details of which are explored in depth— the question of how food allergies would work in a magical world where food (and non-food items) can be transformed into other kinds of food, but do eventually transform back, is key to the plot— and others are thrown out with a sense of no time for explanations! figure it out or don't, but keep up! (At one point, in an attempt to connect the dots between the heavy use of tree-based metaphors - children are called "saplings", the elderly "wear harvest colors" - and the fact it's never explicitly stated that the characters are human, I was like, are they Ents?? or otherwise tree-based beings???, BUT considering the number of references to objects carved out of wood, I really hope they aren't. Anyway, pretty sure they are human, for reasons discussed later.)The tl;dr version of the plot is that Torin, a toymaker with latent magical abilities, finds himself at the heart of two mysteries— his wizard brother's sudden illness, and a stolen jewel— and approximately one and a half love triangles (a love pentagon?), but also everything is significantly less dramatic than that combination of things might suggest. The perspective shifts between Torin; Dilys, a storyteller involved in the love pentagon; and Alrathe, the judge (kind of a cross between a detective and an arbitrator, here) hired to solve the mystery of the missing jewel.
I'd somehow gotten the impression, before reading this, that the judge was going to be the antagonist and, idk, frame Torin for the theft? I was incorrect! The judge was definitely my favorite character, not least because they were canonically nonbinary/non-gendered— Karr carefully avoids gendered language when describing them (although she doesn't actually use gender-neutral "they," I am, here, because it's significantly more convenient) and at one point, a character trips over himself to figure out whether to refer to the judge by the honorific "Father" or "Mother" before the judge says they prefer the gender-neutral title "Cousin." I'm also just very charmed by a fantasy novel with a legal system, albeit a curious, individualized/ad hoc one.
The wildest bit of world-building is the implication that this book takes place In Our Future (references to "ancient records" that appear to describe the modern world, and suggest some sort of apocalyptic population loss; someone says "the ancients may have had something like this" and goes on to describe fireworks), and this future involves fantasy semi-communism. ("Ancient records indicated that long ago folk had considered land a thing which could be owned"; while this principle no longer holds, "even now such buildings as archives, skyreading towers, and in many towns certain specialized crafthouses ... were sealed when vacant, to be assigned by a panel of judges and craft comrades to qualified claimants.") This was one way in which the world-building gave me a sense of deja vu that I ultimately traced to the half-remembered Lois Lowry books from my childhood— the other is that, like in Lowry's Gathering Blue, this society's naming conventions start with one-syllable names for children that get longer with age and rank— although I assume this is just a case of convergent evolution.
ETA: linking to the other reviews in the book chain of
skygiants [x] —> osprey_archer [x] —> me —> chestnut_pod [x]
