Nov. 19th, 2022

skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
I'd had Phyllis Ann Karr's At Amberleaf Fair on my shelf for years after picking it up at a used bookstore, but [personal profile] osprey_archer's visit kicked me into gear to actually read it so that I could pass it off to her on her way out.

This is a very strange little book -- a lot of large-scale-implications worldbuilding utilized to tell a very domestic little story that takes place over a couple of days at a local fantasyland market.

Ostensibly this is a book wrapped up in two mysteries:

Mystery A: toymaker Tobin's wizard brother has mysteriously collapsed and is now deathly ill! EITHER he is tragically afflicted with a common career-ending illness called glory-choking -- difficult to ask for a promotion or explain your accomplishments under these circumstances when being proud of yourself might end up fatal! -- OR he has a previously un-diagnosed allergy, but unfortunately since in this world fancy food is commonly illusion-transformed out of other, different, more boring food it's very difficult to know what he might have an allergy to

Mystery B: Tobin and his bff/foster brother have both proposed to the same girl [whom they've both known since they were adults and she was a child] and now the present that the foster brother made to propose to her with has been replaced with a piece of fruit that his magic-spelled-against-theft tent thinks is technically an appropriate enough trade that it's not actually theft, and he thinks Tobin did it even though no one else really thinks this is at all plausible

The three POV characters are Tobin, the nice age-appropriate storyteller who has a crush on Tobin, and the judge investigating the Situations; the suspense is much less about What Happened In the Situations (the judge has some theories and they're fairly telegraphed) than about whether the Situations are going to result in Tobin making different decisions with his life.

Meanwhile, I am not personally very interested in Tobin and his career or romantic stress -- none of the characters or relationships really go deep enough to be compelling to me -- but I am very interested in the ways in which Karr casually embeds these low-key world-altering bits of magic throughout the book and then pushes them to their limit through the medium of a detective investigation. "We magically transform food into other food on the regular" --> "so what does that mean for food allergies?" is SUCH a good question!

(I am also impressed that Karr manages to go the whole book without gendering the judge and I didn't notice she was doing it until midway through.)

[personal profile] rachelmanija mentions in her review that her copy had an author's note at the end which my physical copy did not have, explaining that the plot of the book was lightly adapted from an out-of-print musical. Based on Karr's known preoccupations, Ruddigore is the lowest-hanging fruit, and I guess ... I can make it Ruddigore?? but you have to really squint, Phyllis! "My brother is ill so I have to decide whether to take over the family wizard business" is NOT the same as "my brother is mad I faked my own death and forced him to take over the family doing-an-evil-deed-a-day-or-I'll-get-killed-by-angry-ghosts business" and really and truly does not create the same interpersonal energy!

Anyway, as Rachel did, I'd be very glad to hear other guesses if anyone else can think of any other Gilbert and Sullivans or other stories from that era that map.

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