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Books Jo Walton Reads

Charming Fantasy: Sharon Shinn’s Summers at Castle Auburn

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Published on February 9, 2012

Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn
Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn

There’s a kind of fantasy I call “kingdom level.” I use it when a book isn’t epic or high fantasy, but it isn’t low fantasy either. I use it if a story is on a scale larger than the protagonists’ own lives, without endangering the whole world—when the fate of a country is at stake. We don’t really have good ways of classifying fantasy by how much things matter, especially as it’s an orthogonal measure to grittiness. (This is the very opposite of gritty.) When the King Comes Home is kingdom level, so is The Hero and the Crown. Kingdom level is a kind of fantasy I particularly enjoy and I wish there were more of it.

Summers at Castle Auburn is a perfect example of this kind of fantasy. Corie is a fourteen year old bastard daughter of a bastard son of an important noble family. She spends most of her year being the apprentice of her herbalist/witch grandmother, but her wholly legitimate, eccentric (and unmarried) uncle has arranged for her to spend her summers at court, at Castle Auburn. There she is addressed as “Lady Coriel” and mingles with the Regent, the Prince, and all the high nobility of the land. There she meets and befriends her legitimate sister, the Prince’s fiance, who against all expectations is delighted to know her. She deals with intrigue and romance and  she meets the aliora, who are elves, and who are kept as slaves.

This is a genuinely charming book which I enjoyed the first time I read it and enjoyed just as much re-reading it now. It’s not the kind of book that’s full of chewy originality, but that’s not a problem. This is a sweet fluffy absorbing novel. Corie is an outsider with a gift for making friends, the peasants are nicer than the nobles, this is a remarkably enlightened fantasy kingdom in all ways but for the treatment of the aliora—and Corie feels about that as we would and acts as we would. In some kinds of book the injustice of the treatment of the alora would be a great deal grittier and more central, but although it provides a great deal of the plot it’s relatively low key. We follow Corie through several summers, and her transition from child to young woman.

My only hesitation with Summers at Castle Auburn on this re-read was thinking that Corie gets away with everything too easily. She knows a bit of magic, and she’s always using it for people’s own good but without their knowledge, and there are never any consequences. She’s always right because the author says so, and I’d like it a bit better if this confident certainty of acting because she knows she’s right even occasionally backfired.

Corie’s narrative voice is lovely, it rattles along, both naive and knowing, drawing us forward through the story. There’s a romance, and as always with Shinn it’s well handled. It’s barely a spoiler to say that all ends happily, because it wouldn’t be this sort of book unless it did. It’s a story about growing up in the woods and castles of a fantasy world, half way to being a fairytale. If you like Robin McKinley you’ll enjoy this. Save it for a rainy day when you’re a bit tired and want to be drawn into a nicer world for an afternoon.


Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two poetry collections and nine novels, most recently Among Others, and if you liked this post you will like it. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Jo Walton

Author

Jo Walton is the author of fifteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others two essay collections, a collection of short stories, and several poetry collections. She has a new essay collection Trace Elements, with Ada Palmer, coming soon. She has a Patreon (patreon.com/bluejo) for her poetry, and the fact that people support it constantly restores her faith in human nature. She lives in Montreal, Canada, and Florence, Italy, reads a lot, and blogs about it here. It sometimes worries her that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.
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