The Shape-Changer's Wife...

[fajrdrako]

I just finished reading The Shape-Changer's Wife by Sharon Shinn. It's a fairy-tale-like book, a story that has a dreamlike quality to it. Usually I enjoy a sense of realism in fantasy, but it wouldn't have fit here. For all its general predictability, I wasn't sure how it would end, though the actual ending was my best guess - and come to think of it, Shinn covered all angles by having two endings. the second in an epilogue, which I found redundant and almost annoying. Pick the one end or the other, don't give us both.

Still. A good read. The story has a young sorcerer named Aubrey coming to apprentice with a shape-changer, known to be nasty and unkind. Aubrey falls in love with the shape-changer's lovely but remote young wife, and has to outwit the old man at his own game.

The otherworldly-neverland of the setting didn't quite work for me, and I wanted Aubrey to have more personality and less passivity, but I enjoyed it to the end.