Throwback Thursday: Summers at Castle Auburn Reveals the Dark Side of a Princess Story

Coriel Halsing is the half-noble child of a family that has always provided brides for their country’s ruling dynasty. We follow her split childhood: raised for most of each year by her grandmother, a healer living in a dirt-floor cottage, and her summers at Castle Auburn, where she is taught upper class manners by her noble relatives and spends time with her beloved half-sister Elisandra, her cousin Kent, her conniving uncles and aunts, the magical alora servants who live here… and of course, the handsome future king.
We meet Corie just as she is coming of age and starting to see the complexity of the world around her. A pawn in her relatives’ power games, she becomes increasingly involved in court politics, and soon must choose the kind of life she wants to lead, weighing the moral dilemmas involved in having privilege in a hierarchical society. Her choices will affect not only her, but the fate of her country.
There are traditional fairy tale elements to this tale—it is a comfort read in the best sense, with all the familiar signposts of the princess stories and castle intrigues we grew up with. Corie attends balls and dances with princes, has adventures and learns magic, all while discovering herself and her world. And it can be enjoyed on this purely escapist level, but there is also more to it—depth that has kept me returning to it again and again over the years.
While it does have the hallmarks of a princess fantasy, there are darker elements not found in any sanitized imagining, including slavery—this is a world that turns magical beings into highly prized slaves, caught by hunters who seduce, capture, and immobilize them with the touch of iron to be sold to nobles across the country. As in our world, these beings are woven into the fabric of households: they raise the children and care for the sick. Yet their masters have the temerity to keep them in chains while calling them “part of the family.” Corie has been raised in this system, but now she’s an adult, and must really reckon with what it means to live as one who benefits from such an ugly institution.
Freedom of choice is a wider theme that defines much of the novel—choosing what you want to do rather than what you could. Shinn reminds us that, whatever our circumstances, we all can build our own lives out of choice after choice until we make the one we want, an idea that I think a genre that deals so much in prophecy and destiny could stand to see underlined more often. Women in particular are constantly shown to be capable of being multiple people, and are sometimes forced to do so in order to survive.
Shinn’s choice to highlight the struggle to separate the discovery of an ability from the realization of personal desire is compelling, and no less invigorating than a flashy climactic battle for being quietly carried out behind the scenes of her characters’ lives. It is also, incidentally, chilling to watch when we see what some of them are capable of doing in order to realize their desires—even the “good” characters. At least one protagonist makes a fateful final choice, convinced is of their own free will, but we’re never certain if that is true.
We, and Corie, encounter the limits of what “choice” really means, and what it is worth to us. There is a moment where she makes what seems to be a morally correct decision, but instead of being celebrated for it, she must face the fact that even apparently clear choices can be more complex than we think, and you have to live with the knowledge that there are people out there who will always disagree with your choices for their own reasons. Reading from Corie’s point of view, we watch her make the mistakes of inexperience, and feel the same uncertainty about her decisions. It is a wonderful way to participate in the doubt that defines the coming of age process.
This is a brilliant novel for readers transitioning from YA fantasy to books with more adult themes, but adult fantasy readers who like their escapism with a touch of darkness will also find in it much to admire.