At Amberleaf Fair [Paperback]

Phyllis Ann Karr (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At the last fair of the season, the toymaker Torin proposes to the beautiful sorceress Sharys, and watches his world shatter. Sharys refuses his marriage token because she has just accepted the proposal of his best friend, the adventurer Valdart. Torin's brother falls suddenly and mysteriously ill, and hovers at the brink of death. Valdart's valuable marriage token is turned into a citron fruit, and he accuses Torin, an ex-magician, of enchanting the necklace to stop his marriage to Torin's beloved. And Torin, who may have created magic in his dreams, doesn't know whether or not he changed Valdart's gift in his sleep.

In addition to At Amberleaf Fair, Phyllis Ann Karr has written four other fine fantasy novels: The Idylls of the Queen, Wildraith's Last Battle, and the series books Frostflower and Thorn and Frostflower and Windbourne. --Cynthia Ward --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Ace (November 1, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 044152009X
• ISBN-13: 978-0441520091
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,774,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Take me to the fair again, January 15, 2009

By 

David Wilkin (La Habra Heights, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: At Amberleaf Fair (Paperback)

From the colorful James Warhola cover, this book entices you in. Karr weaves a gem of a tale, with a prose and style that stands out as not your ordinary fantasy world.

Here craft and trade and magery skills are honored with the payment of pebbles and stones, and honored with song instead of applause. We enter this world and find our protagonist contemplating marriage and offering for a girl that his best friend also desires.

Moments later, we find his brother stricken with what could be an adverse side effect of too much use of magic and desiring that the family traditions not die with him. Our hero is torn for he is a very good toymaker and an indifferent student of magic, though he had shown some success their in his youth.

Thus we have a world with some complexity in it for our story to take place. The story is all of 186 light and quick pages, but the imagery that we get along the way is fabulous, and well worth the investment. Sentences that have been well crafted have you reading them twice and three times to delve into their meaning, for the detail crammed into such few words is amazing. I had first read this book probably 20 years ago and encountering it in my library, wondered what it was about again. I am glad I reread it.