At Amberleaf Fair

By Phyllis Ann Karr

They come to Amberleaf Fair -- toymakers, storytellers, conjurers, and adventurers. They bring song and dance, gifts of love, and tales of far places. But in the midst of celebration, the high wizard Talmar is stricken with what appears to be the Choking Glory, his brother Torin the toymaker has been rejected by his lady love, and a fabulous necklace from across the sea has been stolen -- and Torin is the chief suspect! This year Amberleaf Fair promises to be more than a place of marvels, a crossroads for magic, mysteries, and fabulous wealth. This year the fair promises to be much more interesting ... and dangerous!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781434447425

Phyllis Ann Karr

Born 1944, death date not yet established. Lifelong fictioneer, primary publisher for the last few decades Wildside Press. Savoyard (fan only, non-singing), Droodophile, etc.Pictured with my beloved husband Clifton Alfred Hoyt, who among other things invented a means of measuring gas in tenths of a gallon when pumped into your car. He moved out of his body in 2005. (Note: that's ALFRED, not "Albert," as some places seem to have it erroneously.I once had a poor little website. It got eaten by some Japanese(?) concern peddling -- as nearly as I could make out -- cosmetics. As nearly as I could see, it had never profited me; and as of today, it seems as nearly as I can see to have vanished. Now I leave it all to Wikipedia (which may not always be reliable), Amazon, and Smashwords.Throughout my life (77 years and counting), every time I have tried to blow my own trumpet, somebody has thrown heavy lumps of discouragement into its bell. Now I am like someone shipwrecked on a desert island with several cases of pop, reams of paper, and sharpened pencils, who, after drinking up each bottle, puts in a message and tosses it into the ocean. A few of these messages may eventually be picked up; and, since it will probably be too late for the writer, at least let the message itself give a little enjoyment to the finder.in February 2022 I was appalled to find that somehow -- who was responsible for the goof may never be known -- the dollar ninety-nine cents I thought I had listed for my "Polifonix Poems" message-in-bottle had got transmogrified to a hundred and ninety-nine dollars!! I don't think there is any newly published and/or currently available volume of verse anywhere in the world worth that kind of asking price, unless perhaps it were privately printed on thin sheets of beaten gold and bound in unicorn hide. Apologies to anyone who may have glimpsed that absurd $199.00 and pictured me as endowed with an ego bigger than Mount Everest. Although leaving the price to the purchaser amounts to "free," that's much better than risking such a ridiculously out-of-line price tag by mistake; and I am, after all, pretty well just tossing out messages in bottles.

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Reviews for At Amberleaf Fair

[wunder-62679 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It gets an extra star for being a bit unusual and so pleasant.

The cover art is completely wrong, though. This is a post-science future with no armored knights, no castles, no pennants or flags for nations or fiefdoms, no wars, and hardly any fistfights.

This is a mystery plot in a fantasy-like setting, something I don't think I've read before. Yes, there are guilty parties, but the ending is more like the Shaker song where "`tis the gift to come down where we ought to be".

[dwwilkin_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.