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thebetterstory's review
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
I liked this rather a lot.
It’s an injustice to try to sell it as a fantasy about faeries, because it’s only that in the most tangential sense. What it actually is like is far closer to a coming of age slice-of-life set in university, and particularly looking to capture that breathless, wistful adolescent time in which everyone is immersed in academia and lifelong friendships are formed and broken.
Most of the book is composed of a bunch of witty, rambling dialogue between teen-to-twenty-somethings that perfectly captures what it’s like to spend time with a bunch of clever rambunctious Arts kids, or at least did so to me. Blackstock feels wonderfully real, down to having silly school traditions and abominable food. The characters, too, feel almost startlingly real in a way I’d almost forgotten they could.
One moment I loved in particular was when one roommate comes back to her dorm after a bad date and wrangles her friends into going with her to in the dead of night to throw her awful birth control pills, which have been making her ill for months, entirely into the river. The river is frozen, and it takes all the girls tossing huge stones at it to break the ice to let her do it, and it’s the sort of ridiculous bonding moment that happens precisely when you are young, dramatic, and determinedly silly while being perfectly aware that you’re being so.
I think I would have liked the book just about as much without the fae backdrop, which is highly unusual for me. I rather wished for both the central romance and the full faerie plot to hit a bit sooner if they were going to be in there at all, rather than the book meandering along as it did only to rush them in at the end. I also kept being tempted by hints of something greater going on behind the scenes, which occasionally made me less patient with the rambling descriptions of campus and banter than I wanted to be.
Still, as a portrait of student life and particularly of Arts students’ lives, it’s wonderful. It doubles as an unintentional, intimate snapshot of the time it was written as well; 1991 isn’t that long ago, but it was interesting to me as a baby born later that decade to see how familiar most of it was while still having elements that were long gone by the time I got to university, such as “university messages” to communicate instead of texts and people dragging along mobile typewriter cases to their dorms.
As the book is composed 80% of references to books, theatre and poetry and characters quoting from books, theatre and poetry, Tam Lin certainly won’t be for every reader; I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t specialize in those subjects themselves, or get quite close to it, getting much out of it. But it hit me right in the nostalgia, and it’s made me eager to pick up Dean’s other works.
It’s an injustice to try to sell it as a fantasy about faeries, because it’s only that in the most tangential sense. What it actually is like is far closer to a coming of age slice-of-life set in university, and particularly looking to capture that breathless, wistful adolescent time in which everyone is immersed in academia and lifelong friendships are formed and broken.
Most of the book is composed of a bunch of witty, rambling dialogue between teen-to-twenty-somethings that perfectly captures what it’s like to spend time with a bunch of clever rambunctious Arts kids, or at least did so to me. Blackstock feels wonderfully real, down to having silly school traditions and abominable food. The characters, too, feel almost startlingly real in a way I’d almost forgotten they could.
One moment I loved in particular was when one roommate comes back to her dorm after a bad date and wrangles her friends into going with her to in the dead of night to throw her awful birth control pills, which have been making her ill for months, entirely into the river. The river is frozen, and it takes all the girls tossing huge stones at it to break the ice to let her do it, and it’s the sort of ridiculous bonding moment that happens precisely when you are young, dramatic, and determinedly silly while being perfectly aware that you’re being so.
I think I would have liked the book just about as much without the fae backdrop, which is highly unusual for me. I rather wished for both the central romance and the full faerie plot to hit a bit sooner if they were going to be in there at all, rather than the book meandering along as it did only to rush them in at the end. I also kept being tempted by hints of something greater going on behind the scenes, which occasionally made me less patient with the rambling descriptions of campus and banter than I wanted to be.
Still, as a portrait of student life and particularly of Arts students’ lives, it’s wonderful. It doubles as an unintentional, intimate snapshot of the time it was written as well; 1991 isn’t that long ago, but it was interesting to me as a baby born later that decade to see how familiar most of it was while still having elements that were long gone by the time I got to university, such as “university messages” to communicate instead of texts and people dragging along mobile typewriter cases to their dorms.
As the book is composed 80% of references to books, theatre and poetry and characters quoting from books, theatre and poetry, Tam Lin certainly won’t be for every reader; I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t specialize in those subjects themselves, or get quite close to it, getting much out of it. But it hit me right in the nostalgia, and it’s made me eager to pick up Dean’s other works.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Pregnancy
Minor: Sexism and Abortion
trin's review against another edition
3.0
Mixed feelings, once again! On the plus side, I absolutely could not put this book down. Dean makes the setting—a midwestern liberal arts college in the early '70s—come alive so completely that even when the biggest issue at stake is what classes Janet, our heroine, is going to take, I was utterly entranced. In fact, the straightforward college narrative is so convincing and so good that I would have been perfectly happy for the book to be about nothing but that. Which is not to say that I didn't like the undercurrent of weird supernatural goings-on—on the contrary, I LOVE that kind of thing. I love hints that something's not quite right, of something "off" just beneath the surface. I love that at the beginning of a story—but I must put the emphasis there on the beginning. In a 460 page novel, I think it's a problem if said undercurrents stay nothing but undercurrents until page 425. The revelation ends up feeling rushed; the mystical climax oddly tacked on. It got to the point where I kind of wanted Janet's rescue of her Tam Lin stand-in to remain metaphorical, not magical—an atypical response for me. Especially when all the characters seem so blasé about what's just happened. I was like, "Hello! You only had about 20 pages to get used to this! How are you back to discussing Pope already?"
That said, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book because I did enjoy the build-up so much, and because Janet is such a wonderful character. Also: it's a book where the hero's an English major! That, alone, makes me extraordinarily happy.
That said, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book because I did enjoy the build-up so much, and because Janet is such a wonderful character. Also: it's a book where the hero's an English major! That, alone, makes me extraordinarily happy.
emlickliter's review
adventurous
medium-paced
4.0
Tam Lin by Pamela Dean – I had fun with Tam Lin retellings this week! This one is totally different because its set in the 1970s on a college campus. Its very much a coning of age story! Happy Reading!
jmbayer's review against another edition
1.0
I didn't actually finish this book. It was dry, I didn't particularly like any of the characters, and I still had 3/4 of the book to go. Maybe I'll finish it in the future. But for now, I'm done.
embereye's review
4.0
This is one of those books that I consider a rainy-day book. I remember reading it in high school and really really looking forward to college. Even now when I read it, I end up making lists of references to literature and history that I want to read up on. For some reason (also with Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary) Pamela Dean is very capable of making the life of an academically focused and gifted student fascinating as well as bring the assumed level of discourse between characters to include quotations from every part of a classical academic background.
This layering of quotations from Shakespeare, Jonson, Keats, Milton, Homer, Chaucer etc. gives the story extra layers of meaning that make it a pleasure to read several times over.
This layering of quotations from Shakespeare, Jonson, Keats, Milton, Homer, Chaucer etc. gives the story extra layers of meaning that make it a pleasure to read several times over.
gck's review against another edition
4.0
It took me awhile to warm to the author’s writing style. From the description and genre, it seems like it would be a fast read, but it ended up not being the case for me. At over 400 pages, it was a thick book, and I didn’t read through them quickly. It seemed like some things dragged on slowly, but other times, I found myself having to reread passages because I didn’t quite follow where a transition happened. The most common example would be in conversation where suddenly it would mention that someone was furious, but I couldn’t understand from the dialogue when it went from normal conversation to anger. This and other character reactions that I didn’t understand showed some amount of emotional disconnect between me and the author.
If you’ve ever dreamed of being enrolled in an elite liberal arts college and having a group of well-read friends to have sophisticated intellectual conversations with, this could be a great book for you. It’s hard not to be immersed into the setting, and I enjoyed feeling like I was sitting with Janet and her roommates in their dorm room or listening to lectures in English class. The conversations constantly make references to works of Shakespeare, Keats, and more. Enough of the references are clarified so that you won’t be completely lost if you don’t recognize them. However, a reader with absolutely no interest in English literature might find all of this extremely boring or possibly even pretentiously annoying.
I enjoyed the mystical elements of the story, especially the ghost who threw books out of the window, the tradition of the piper, and the horse riders. The action of the fairy tale retelling was a little odd, but I felt that way about the traditional version of the fairy tale, too. Overall, I felt like the fairy tale was a good way to wrap up the story and also helped set the mood for the novel, but the other interactions between the characters were more prominent.
If you’ve ever dreamed of being enrolled in an elite liberal arts college and having a group of well-read friends to have sophisticated intellectual conversations with, this could be a great book for you. It’s hard not to be immersed into the setting, and I enjoyed feeling like I was sitting with Janet and her roommates in their dorm room or listening to lectures in English class. The conversations constantly make references to works of Shakespeare, Keats, and more. Enough of the references are clarified so that you won’t be completely lost if you don’t recognize them. However, a reader with absolutely no interest in English literature might find all of this extremely boring or possibly even pretentiously annoying.
I enjoyed the mystical elements of the story, especially the ghost who threw books out of the window, the tradition of the piper, and the horse riders. The action of the fairy tale retelling was a little odd, but I felt that way about the traditional version of the fairy tale, too. Overall, I felt like the fairy tale was a good way to wrap up the story and also helped set the mood for the novel, but the other interactions between the characters were more prominent.
vizira's review against another edition
5.0
love a book I can basically never recommend to any other human being
jmitschke's review against another edition
5.0
95% about being a lit nerd in college in the 70s, including characters who talk to each other almost exclusively in literary allusions, and 5% a modern fantasy/fairy tale update.
I loved this so much as a teen (it informed many of my adolescent ideas and aspirations about college and adulthood). With a good deal of nostalgia in the mix, it reread pretty well.
First read in the 1990s
Retread in 2016
I loved this so much as a teen (it informed many of my adolescent ideas and aspirations about college and adulthood). With a good deal of nostalgia in the mix, it reread pretty well.
First read in the 1990s
Retread in 2016