Tam Lin is a 1991 contemporary fantasy novel by United States author Pamela Dean, who based it on the traditional Scottish border ballad "Tam Lin".
This book has vibrant characters and that's its saving grace. Nearly all of the book comes across as a young woman's early college experience and most of it gives the impression that it's layered with references and jokes that only an English major will love/catch.
4.5 stars
I really enjoyed this, and I suspect that if I'd read it when I was closer to college age, that I'd have adored it. The protagonist, Janet, is intelligent, driven, and thinks things through. The dialog is a mad tangle of literary allusions, which is great fun. The characters vary, and have some depth to them.[return]The book starts out with a straightforward tale of college life, but the fantasy element gradually tiptoes in, until it's built into a suspenseful page-turner.
I may be the last person on the internet to read this. I would like to thank Kphoebe and Cassie Claire for making sure I got around to it.
It's very hard to express how much, and also how I loved this book. It is an extraordinarily slow-moving book, but despite that, at no point did I wish it would hurry up. It is an extraordinarily literate book and at times reminded me of [author: Dorothy L. Sayers] in the wealth of casual allusions to fairly obscure texts.
I've never read a book that I wanted so little to finish; I think it may have taken me a month to read it, and I sometimes went a week without picking it up. There were no cliff-hangers, no rising tension, and although their was a central mystery, I can't say I found myself caring about it much. Clearly something was up, …
I may be the last person on the internet to read this. I would like to thank Kphoebe and Cassie Claire for making sure I got around to it.
It's very hard to express how much, and also how I loved this book. It is an extraordinarily slow-moving book, but despite that, at no point did I wish it would hurry up. It is an extraordinarily literate book and at times reminded me of [author: Dorothy L. Sayers] in the wealth of casual allusions to fairly obscure texts.
I've never read a book that I wanted so little to finish; I think it may have taken me a month to read it, and I sometimes went a week without picking it up. There were no cliff-hangers, no rising tension, and although their was a central mystery, I can't say I found myself caring about it much. Clearly something was up, but I was reasonably certain it would be revealed in its own time, and in the meanwhile, I was enjoying the book. It was a bit like reading [author: L'engle]'s [book: A Circle of Quiet]. The prose is so fucking gorgeous that to rush through it would be a sin. This book is dense with pure talent, and makes me insanely jealous. I keep on calling it 'lovely,' by which I mean it is so warmly human and optimistic, so perfectly expressive of the deranged utopia that is academia, and so sympathetic, without a trace of condescension, to the foibles of youth.
I don't recommend anyone read this book without time to enjoy it; I think it is a perfect book for a week's vacation-- I wouldn't want to have read it on the bus. Other than that, I recommend it unreservedly.
Spoilers follow
I spent the first several chapters of the book waiting for the plot to happen, which it pretty much refused to do, or at least, nothing resembling plot which I was expecting. When you start a book named "Tam Lin" and the protagonist's name is Janet, you have some expectations. All of those expectations suddenly came into play in the last chapter, and although I can't say they weren't borne of elements present throughout the book, the book could easily have been trimmed down to just that chapter and the plot would have remained nearly the same. Which is a lesson to us all that it's not about 'plot,' it's about story.
I was slightly disappointed by how neatly things were wrapped up at the end, even though compared to some books, the plot threads were more or less left in a confusing tangle. That said, I didn't at all buy Thomas and Janet as especially suited for each other, (not that I see them as unsuited,) and although I understood that one cannot (I discover) tell a story named 'Tam-lin' without a pregnancy, I could have done without a baby to create instant family.
