Pamela Dean (1)Besprekingen

I adored this book—an atmospheric college saga about adolescence, literature, and enchantment, told in a confident literary voice reminiscent of Dorothy L. Sayers. It would be the perfect book to curl up with on a stormy autumn evening, but it was quite compelling enough in late August.

Tam Lin tells its story with a lot of negative space—often the supernatural elements and emotional content are just beyond Janet's apprehension. You spend a lot of time dancing across the surfaces of her life, which I found incredibly effective, although it might bore some readers. I prefer my supernatural fiction shadowy and subtextual, just like unspoken desire, just like the meanings of the stories that Janet surrounds herself with as an English major. This understated approach to fantasy reminds me of Alan Garner's Owl Service, even though Tam Lin is far wordier.

It's such a sprawling octopus of a book that I plan on rereading it to decide how well all the threads hold together and why Dean chose to combine the elements she did. I will say that the ending was clever but didn't blow me away, but it's not really fair—I was comparing it to Fire and Hemlock, the other Tam Lin retelling about books and concealed emotional truths.

I do have to lodge a complaint that Dean retold Tam Lin on a college campus and didn't name one of the academic buildings Carter Hall. But maybe that would have been too obvious.

Read this series a few years ago and don't recall it very well now. I do know that I decided not to keep the books when I'd finished as the reality didn't quite match the promise of the premis, which is potentially very intriguing - children have to act out in reality parts that they previously pretended as a game, but with dangerous consequences that have to be actually experienced. Liked the characters and it was quite a good read but somehow didn't turn out good enough to be a 'keeper'.

Not much to say as the books turned out not to quite match up to the promise of the idea although I liked the characterisation. So haven't kept them and don't remember much detail.

A series I enjoyed, with quite good characterisation, and the intriguing idea that a complex game acted out by children becomes 'real' and they then have to bluff it out and try to second guess what will happen as it doesn't always stick to the plot of their game.

This is one of those classic fantasy books on my TBR list forever. I finally got around to reading it, and am I glad I did. To be fair, this book barely has any overt fantasy, mainly in the last few pages, but it's set in the early seventies at a college in the Midwest. I'm from that era, so I appreciated the story anyway.
It's based on an old Scottish ballad, so there are actually a lot more fantasy references if you know the story. In the song, Janet Carter is pregnant by her lover Tam Lin who belongs to the Queen of Elfland. She must rescue him by pulling him from his horse and keeping hold of him as the Queen transforms him into different creatures, finally not dropping him as a burning brand.
Ms. Dean transplants the story to a college setting, which works very well. I'm not sure that a younger reader would appreciate the details she weaves into the story. Still, I delighted in the references to purple Mimeo sheets, checkbooks, political and music asides, and other iconic symbols of that time.
I also appreciated the quotes and references to other books and plays that were part of a college education (at least back then - do they even teach Latin and Greek in school anymore?). It took me back to my own college days when we left notes in Elvish for each other and shared music/books in free-for-all discussions late at night; there's a definite nostalgia element in reading this book for me.
The writing is lyrical, a descriptive love letter to the setting and the characters. The protagonist, Janet, is practical, testy, and strong. She deals with contraception, difficult roommates, and her studies. She wants to get the most out of her college years while constantly feeling she's missing things. She struggles with which courses she wants to take or the secrets her friends may be hiding, but also doesn't have the time to delve into them much. This leads to the first few years seeming stretched out and the ending feeling a bit rushed. It's not enough to bother me as I enjoyed the book immensely. Tam Lin is a throwback to the fantasy books I read in my youth by Charles de Lint, Patrica McKillip, Robin McKinley, or Terri Wilding. It may not be for everyone, but I'm firmly in the camp that loves this book and plan to reread it in future.

Very satisfying collection of Liavek stories -- lovely to return to that world, lovely to read new stories in it, and pleasing to have all the ones about these characters in one place.

I have been somewhat roundly and gleefully ravished by this book over the last couple days- I took it with me to a New Years' party and this morning, at around 4am, I cheerfully relinquished the last remaining pretense of sleep and went to make a plate of pasta in my underwear so I could finish it. I have actually had the sneaking suspicion it would have this effect on me for several years now, I think, and thusly put it off- look, everyone's got a thing, alright, and for whatever unknowable reason, mine's Tam Lin adaptations. Every time I think I've escaped them I find another one and they stick to my brain like treacle. Anyway, this was an easy and immediate five star, everything Pamela Dean's written is now on my kindle, I already want to reread it (but I'll hold off for a little). It made me work to piece everything together, always good with a ballad retelling, and it was Bisexual As Hell.

Was recently reminded of this one by [b:A College of Magics|382870|A College of Magics (A College of Magics, #1)|Caroline Stevermer|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1312062335s/382870.jpg|1407092]

I read the first third of this book thinking it was Perilous Gard by Pope that I last read in junior high. This book is not that one. I'll be checking to see if PG lives up to my memory.

If one had attended college in Minnesota in the 70s or 80s I think this book would be a pleasant way to spend time. I found it too long, too heterosexual and too old fashioned in its English academic opinions.

Also the switching of boyfriends was unexpected and I never understood the appeal of the one true love.

Loved this all the way through but it really turned sharply at the very end. Set in a liberal arts university in the Northern United States, most of the story deals with an English major, her room mates, their oppressive course loads and their romantic entanglements. Their erudition and mastery of great writers in English, Latin and Greek is dazzling, and the detail of their daily lives is compelling. [SPOILERS] There is also a backstory of a ghost lobbing books out of a window at midnight, and a fairly strange set of teachers and students in the classics department, but this strand never quite takes centre stage, until it does very dramatically at the very end. Highly recommended.

This was highly recommended by several people but I'm not sure it works . . . Maybe better as a novella? Great premise for a novel but Dean keeps reader emotionally distant from her characters - we only really get to know Janet although the others sound really interesting. Too little character development for me I think. Also, handling the passage of time is uneven for me . . . First 1/3 of the book is freshman year but ends during senior year. Hmmm. Don't know if I'd recommend or not . . .

a small college involves heroine in faery

Mixed

I enjoyed some of the stories involving Rikiki and Granny, but there were others that...I respect the skill and insight that went into their crafting, but I did not enjoy reading them. I was more conscious of the craft than I prefer.

Amusing, but not top shelf.

Mixed

I enjoyed some of the stories involving Rikiki and Granny, but there were others that...I respect the skill and insight that went into their crafting, but I did not enjoy reading them. I was more conscious of the craft than I prefer.

Amusing, but not top shelf.

I might have given this 5 stars if the first year had been written in the same length as the second and 4th years. Instead, the first year takes up most of the book with only occasional hints at the actual plot surrounded by irrelevant details. And I guess that may be the point, Janet misses the important details what with everything else that's going on, but it makes for some very slow reading. It got very good once it sped up at sophomore year, but I'm not sure the first year was worth slogging through to get there.

I'm sorry. I think I'm the only person on earth who didn't like this book, but I hated it. I only finished it, because I was reading it for a book challenge. Otherwise I would have given up way before I ever finished it.

I wasn't attached to any of the characters. It felt like a Narnia with kids who just bickered and sniped the entire time and never agreed on anything. Patrick was Edmund, but without the outright betrayal. Laura was obviously Lucy. Ted was noticeably Peter. Ruth and Ellen were the leftovers, and must therefore be Susan. Okay, those two and Susan weren't as obvious. But, yeah, it was pretty much an easy match up with the others.

Laura was over the top "Bella Swan" klutzy. Ruth was always shouting at people, or slapping them, or threatening to slap/kill/whatever them. Patrick was simply a smarmy smarty pants who didn't seem to get on with anyone else. And, Ted couldn't decide who he was or what he wanted.

I wanted to get attached to Randolf, or Fence, or Laura...someone, anyone. I didn't. It was simply painful and I read 3 other books during the process to break it into tinier, more manageable chunks of misery.

Everyone else I know who read this book loved it. If you're into this sort of thing, by all means; give it a try. I, however, hated it and cannot recommend it.

Interesting. It's been a long time since I read any Liavek stories, and the only one I remembered was the legend of Rikiki and Ryvenna, the first story. The rest were - well-written, aside from Shards which had such a jumbled timeline it made no sense; evocative; carried forward a very complex arc (most of them) - and most of them weren't very interesting to me, dysfunctional family and minor politics (with gods involved, so sometimes not so minor). The last one was the one I enjoyed most, tying more of the threads of Liavek together. I may read more Liavek stories if I come across them.½

Sorry, Isabel. But nothing happens for ages and ages.

I am almost 200 pages in and I think I am going to give this up. I normally love stories that occur in an academic setting, but this one is so bogged down in the minutiae of college life that I cannot find the actual story. So far, Janet has moved into her dorm room, made a few friends, had some classes, eaten in the cafeteria, and seen a show. There are loads of irrelevant details about the architecture, the grounds, the food, the professors' quirks, her friends' clothes, and so on... of course you want to present a fully-realized world but this is all there is, and it's overkill.

DNF at 30%, may re-approach. Prose was dreamy, it just lost some momentum for me.

I'm not sure of my rating yet; I have to think on it.

When a new house suddenly goes up in the vacant lot next door, Gentian and her sisters Juniper and Rosemary are naturally intrigued. Though the three are initially excited that something interesting is happening in their Minneapolis neighborhood, they're gradually disillusioned as the only person to emerge from the house is Dominic, a weirdly off-putting teenage boy, who chooses to speak only in literary quotes. To make matters worse, Gentian's treasured attic telescope begins to malfunction, displaying images of the house next door rather than the heavens.

There were a number of things that irritated me about this book. Foremost, though they attend a "progressive" school and Gentian's parents are admittedly somewhat offbeat, the profound behavior, interests, internal monologues, and conversations of this collection of kids in their early teens require a serious suspension of disbelief. Also disorienting was the author's writing style and choice of phrase, which felt foreign (British?) though the author, like me, hails from Minnesota (to be fair, perhaps she isn't a native). Ultimately, very little of interest occurred until the final 50 pages of the story, and even then the "twist" ending was weird, vague and unsatisfactory.

Interestingly, I experienced a case of synchronicity or what I've decided to call Literary Baader-Meinhof Phenomena while reading this book: Though published in 1998, on page 187 Gentian makes a reference to the 2017 solar eclipse, and I just so happened to read that page just four days after observing the 2017 eclipse myself.

This is the third time I've read this large volume and both times were before I could record my thoughts. The first time I read it I felt such a huge amount of regret about the way that my own college years went. It was almost a manual about how to stick with a major you like, not one your (graduating) boyfriend likes in your freshman year.

The second time I read it, the regrets went away and I read an entertaining story. But I still felt there were things I didn't "get" in the history of Janet and her friends.

This third time is the charm. I read it with a sense of unreality of the re-telling and the characters. My biggest question was, what 18 year old incoming freshman has read Tolkien, Shakespeare, Eddison, and Eliot and can quote them from memory at a moment's notice? Her relationship with Nick is a bit long for an unsuccessful college-age romance, and I felt the same sense of unbalance in the book itself as I did with Book 4 (or 5?) of the Harry Potter series: the entire first half of the book is her freshman year. I think it was Book 5 in the Harry Potter series where the first 180 pages is devoted to Harry's first *week* back in Hogwarts after Cedric Diggory's death. Same thing here. There is just too much detail on books, quotes, where a particular hall is located and walking over the stone bridge vs. the other bridge over a lack that is a wooden bridge, and which hall is new and which is over the steam tunnels . . . too many details that really remain unused, even at the tail end.

The important part of this story, that of Janet's rescue of Thomas, is devoted to a strong romance of a few months and the last 10 pages dealing with the rescue itself. I would have much preferred an underlying dynamic that is less about Janet and the many books she reads and instead a romance and an exploration of the Fairy Queen that forms a stronger backbone through this huge book.

I have two bones to pick with this book; well, actually, two bones. One small one with the author and a much larger one with the current publisher's marketing department.

The smaller bone first: I was a faculty child for my undergraduate years, and an English major (along with a block of Classics). Janet's relative lack of knowledge of the university (specifically, the faculty) where her father teaches Romantics (mine taught Hegel) keeps breaking my WSOD.

Of my five professors in first year, I was acquainted with three, not because I chose courses based in whether I knew who taught them (though I did choose sections in two courses by what I knew of them: of the two professors, one I had known for eight years, and one I knew of only by name) but just because one becomes familiar with one's father's SCR and departmental colleagues, not to mention the number of faculty members whose children had gone to high school with one. And all my teachers, all the dons, my head of college, knew who I was.

Janet, by comparison, knows the campus, but not the people. I have a very hard time seeing her as a faculty child.

As for the bigger bone: this book was originally published as an adult fantasy book as part of Tor's Fairy Tale series. It has been republished, and marketed, as a YA/teen book.

This is a book whose full enjoyment depends on things like knowing who Robert Armin was, or what the actual sound of Shakespeare's English was like. It helps if one knows Le Roman de la Rose, The Lady's Not For Burning, Tourneur, Summer's Last Will and Testament, classical tragedy, and Stoppard, or at least about them. These are not things which any plausible typical teen is going to know. (I did, in fact, know these things by 19, by which time I was in second year university, but I'm pretty sure that's not the slot envisaged by "teen literature".) There is no reasonable sense in which this book can be considered as aimed at anything other than an adult audience, and a fairly well-educated adult audience at that.

Overall, though, it's a delightful book, and better (I think) than Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, although Jones has a better structure, starting in medias res. The disparity in ages in Jones' version works against the story, whereas the undergraduate atmosphere of Dean's story actively helps the flow of the story.

There are two complaints I see about it which I want to answer.

First is the pacing and structure. As Jo Walton said regarding her experience of writing her Barrayaran/Shakespearian Tam Lin, the structure of the ballad mirrors the structure of the book, and is an integral part of the tale: that is, there is a long secular lead-up with the fairy ride coming only at the very end. Not only that, but Dean succeeds in making this book two parallel and intertwined stories: one stands up well with no Fairy Queen at all: it's the story Molly refers to when she says, in response to Janet's "It's only been three weeks.", "If you mean you and Thomas, it's been three years": Just excise a chapter and a half and you have a lovely, Gaudy Night-level nostalgic tale of University and a slowly developing love. The second tale is that of those who have been taken under hill, filtered through naive perspective of Janet: Nick's and Robin's story, one of separation from the world even in interaction with it; and that story has its climax with the full revelation of the unhumanness of the Faerie Queen.

The compression and extension of time reflect subjective experience: the non-routine highlighted, the routine passed over.

There is also the complaint that people do not talk like that: i.e. quote extended (or even short) bits of Shakespeare, Nashe, or Homer in general conversation, To which I must respond: I know such people, and I have been one of them. All it takes is a decent memory, reasonably wide reading, and an appropriate context. (In the book, of course, these elements have a double role).½

Fun. A collection of short stories all set in the same city and following various members of the same family as they struggle to cope with living in a foreign city. The stories pick up some ten or more years after they've settled there, and are more or less chronological, although a couple start before the previous one finished.

The basic princlple of hte world seems to be that everyone is born with magic, but most don't use it. If you haven't actively decided to do so, the most you'll get is a few hours of luck, for the duration of your birth each year. Magicians make the concious choice to learn how to invest their luck into an object that gives' them a year's worth of magic. There are few local gods too brought a long with various population influxes. Other than that it's pretty much a standard trading / port city, never quite at peace with it's neighbours, but more or less settled.

As ever with short stories I liked some more than others. None of them were that short. I think my favourite was probably the Green Temple of Suicides, where the priests ensure that only once you've settled all your responsibilities in this world can you contemplate the options for leaving it.