books | Book Review: Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn

Summers at Castle Auburn is a quiet romantic fantasy that addresses social problems, but keeps it in the background. Our heroine is a young woman named Coriel who spends summers at Castle Auburn, the royal palace. She is the bastard child of the bastard son of noble and is--pretty much without her actual awareness for most of the novel--being groomed for an advantageous or at least politically useful marriage. She has a close relationship with her half-sister, has a crush of her sister’s fiancée, and is somewhat feckless and fancy free. Fortunately, she has a strong vocation for becoming a healer and has no intention of ruining her relationship with her sister by acting on her crush.

The plot follows a “coming of age” trajectory where Corie slowly becomes aware that life at the castle is not nearly as idyllic as she thought it was when she was a child.

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