At Amberleaf Fair

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.