Jeffrey Overstreet’s Auralia’s Colors is a fascinating fantasy novel. If any of the words in that last sentence, like ‘fantasy’ or ‘novel’ made you cringe inside, let me tell you that I enjoyed the book, but you probably won’t.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can move on. Auralia’s Colors takes place in a different world, one that is divided into 4 houses (they’re really city-states, but they’re called ‘houses’) and that has recently seen a terrible war and a curse upon one of the houses. The curse turns the inhabitants of the house into beastmen, terrifying mutations that have some bestial characteristics and some human ones, and that are a threat to people throughout the land. But they really threaten House Abascar, where our story takes place.


It concerns the ruling family of Abascar, and a proclamation one of them made that there would be no colors in the city (except the ruling family - of course they could have color!). A foundling, Auralia, finds that she has an amazing talent for finding colorful pieces of nature and for putting the colors from them into other things that she makes. It’s a pretty mystical power that she has. You can maybe see where this is going: Auralia’s talent with colors puts her in conflict with the rulers of Abascar. However, Overstreet does a good job of adding twists and turns to the plot, so I was never bored.

The characters were interesting, although one was maddeningly absent for much of the book (I wanted to know more about him) and the world obviously had a whole history of its own that we never really get to see (I wanted to know more about that too) Thankfully, there will be several more books coming out, set in the same world, but focusing on some of the other characters and not on Auralia, and talking about the consequences of her colors. All in all, I enjoyed this book, and if you like a good fantasy tale, you probably will too.