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. ( )

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. ( )

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

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. ( )

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. ( )

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). ( )

Love, love, love this book. I've read it twice, and on the second time I thought about how dedicated the trio of college roommates were to each other. And how well they stuck to their studies :) The description of the couples, the men who surround the Fairy Queen, and the final culmination of the story of fair Tam Lin are very, very well done. ( )

set in a small american liberal-arts college in the early seventies, this is a lovely book about the joys and passions of that first full immersion in learning, literature, and life, as the main characters move over four years from adolescence to adulthood. Pamela Dean is such a good writer, especially of this period in life, and i so wish there was more of her to read. oh, the Tam Lin subplot? almost irrelevant on this canvas, but it's quite an interesting sideways look at the legend all the same, addressing the question of what happens after that seven years of service thing (if not the cold hillside), for both the fairy queen and her once-mortal lovers. ( )

I am divided in my reactions to this novel. There is much of interest and charm in it, but there is way way way too much description, even for me. The story bumps along far too long, with far too little happening or changing, making it more of a basket for ruminations on literature and theatre than a full-bodied story in itself. I would recommend it to certain folk who would be entertained by the ruminations and evocations of their student days, and I do have some fondness for the characters, but I would love to take a very sharp editor's blade to this book. ( )

What a strange, wonderful book. Ostensibly a retelling of the Scottish ballad "Tam Lin," this is really a story about college. The "Tam Lin" stuff is only very subtly there (until it is not subtle at all), but the weird things going on because of the seepage of Elfland into the small liberal arts college of the story do not stand out as odd, and eventually everything comes together. I only know about Tam Lin because Jo Walton talked about it in her What Makes This Book So Great (and I might have made a quite undignified noise and a very greedy grab when I came across it in a used-bookstore trawl last week. Thankfully, only husbeast, who is sympathetic to such things, was within close earshot). Walton says Dean "is doing college as magic garden. The whole experience of going to university is magical, in a sense, is a time away from other time, a time that influences people's whole lives but is and isn't part of the real world."* Agreed, and I thought throughout reading Tam Lin that Dean had captured that time perfectly: the world of reading and learning and of the subjects you're studying can (and persistently do, especially for a particular brand of student) seem far, far more real than anything outside the sphere the college throws up, and you often live in your friends' pockets in ways that will never again be not unhealthy. It is a world I sometimes suspect the 21st century is killing; I was struck with the notion while reading that I might have been part of the last group of students who could experience college in quite this way, who would see their college experience in the book.

Tam Lin takes place in the early seventies: there were no computers and no internet, each dorm floor had one telephone in the hall, and each dorm building had one TV in the lounge. Signing up for classes involved a paper form and tramping around campus to gather signatures and hand in that form in person. If one wanted to stay completely isolated from the outside world, one hardly needed to try. When I attended college in the early aughts, technology had already made avoiding anything beyond the insular, scholarly world of campus much harder (nearly everyone brought a computer to campus; we had (wired, omg) internet connections in our dorm rooms; every room had a phone; you were hard-pressed to find a room without a dizzying array of other distracting, worldly technologies: televisions, VCRs, DVD players, stereos, game consoles). But hardly anyone had a cellphone (and if they did, they were cell phones, which did little your room phone couldn't do), and social media, for all intents and purposes, did not exist (Facebook had not yet hit the 'net and neither had Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, or Instagram. Even Myspace hadn't popped up yet). The easiest way to contact someone on campus was still to go knock on their door (and leave them a handwritten note if they weren't in). The registrar's office was computerized, but we still signed up for classes by filling out a form and tramping around campus after signatures. Not everyone then lived primarily within the world of campus (even to the extent they could) because not everyone wanted to. I'm sure this has always been true (campuses which became hotbeds of political dissent surely had thousands of students doing everything they could to avoid succumbing to an insular "college as magic garden") and I imagine small liberal arts colleges (especially those is small, semi-rural towns) have always been "better"** at creating this sort of environment than large universities, especially those in big cities.

I wonder, though, if college students today, who all carry (by 1970's standards) unfathomably powerful computers in their pockets and need never be more than a finger-swipe away from any and every aspect of the "outside" world they care to see, can ever really get to the "magic garden" of college that Dean describes, even if they want to. I suspect they cannot, and that strikes me as a bit of a tragedy. Not that our new technologies can't and don't do for us many wonderful things, but they, of course, leave some old ways of being tattered in their wake. This particular experience of college may be one of them, and that makes me doubly, triply, thrilled that there's a book like Tam Lin out there that captures so nicely what that purposely, delightedly isolated four-year-long sojourn into a kind of other world felt like. The retelling of "Tam Lin" gives the story something to hang itself on, something for it to do, but the book is really a snapshot of a piece of 20th-century life I suspect is largely gone.

*Page 64, for those of you following along. :-p

**Scare quotes because I suspect that only a small number of students at any school at any time actually think this kind of world is better. ( )

Magical reality that is truly magical and fully realized. I love this book. Wore out my paperback copy and bought the hardback. ( )

I love this book. So much. I have read it manymanymany times.
And every time I read it, the world of Janet Carter and Blackstock College gets more real to me than my own, at least for a week or two. ( )

I love this book. So much. I have read it manymanymany times.
And every time I read it, the world of Janet Carter and Blackstock College gets more real to me than my own, at least for a week or two. ( )

I love this book. So much. I have read it manymanymany times.
And every time I read it, the world of Janet Carter and Blackstock College gets more real to me than my own, at least for a week or two. ( )

I love this book. So much. I have read it manymanymany times.
And every time I read it, the world of Janet Carter and Blackstock College gets more real to me than my own, at least for a week or two. ( )

A great compendium of college life with a Scottish ballad thrown in..awesome and very strange...Sara, one for you ;) ( )