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Tam Lin (Fairy Tale)

by Pamela Dean, Terri Windling (Goodreads Author) (Introduction)

3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 · rating details · 2,879 ratings · 313 reviews

In the ancient Scottish ballad "Tam Lin," headstrong Janet defies Tam Lin to walk in her own land of Carterhaugh . . . and then must battle the Queen of Faery for possession of her lover’s body and soul. In this version of "Tam Lin," masterfully crafted by Pamela Dean, Janet is a college student, "Carterhaugh" is Carter Hall at the university where her father teaches, and...more

Paperback, 468 pages

Published August 3rd 2006 by Firebird (first published 1991)

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Mar 30, 2009 Melody rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Melody by: A plethora of Burtons

Shelves: favorites, burton-browbeating

Letting this one simmer a bit, I'm not ready to review it. Hell, I'm not sure I was ready to read it.

ETA:

Okay.
I loved the literary allusions. I found the characters, for the most part, quite believable- and the unbelievable ones were Myth Incarnate, so that was wonderful. The pacing was uneven and I'd have been just as happy had the last three years been as leisurely told as the first one. I'm familiar with the legend, and loved this treatment of it. Did I mention the rich literary trove this st...more

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May 31, 2008 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: alumni/alumnae of liberal arts colleges who like to read

Shelves: books-about-books, scottish, in-by-of-the-americas, reviewed, tam-lin, fantasy-sci-fi, fey

If you went to school in a small, midwestern liberal arts college, and loved language (whether or not you studied it), you will love this book. While I may not know many people who can quote, without thinking, from all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Homer's epics, the English Romantic poets, and Jacobean drama, all my friends love reading and books and language, so reading this book is like talking with a good friend. It gives me a wonderful feeling every time I pick it up.

Language and lit...more If you went to school in a small, midwestern liberal arts college, and loved language (whether or not you studied it), you will love this book. While I may not know many people who can quote, without thinking, from all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Homer's epics, the English Romantic poets, and Jacobean drama, all my friends love reading and books and language, so reading this book is like talking with a good friend. It gives me a wonderful feeling every time I pick it up.

Language and literature are loved and discussed, casually and at length, as the characters go about the business of being college students in the early 1970s. When I first read this book, in college, I didn't even notice that it wasn't a contemporary setting, so clearly did I feel like she was describing some, if not all, of my own college experience. Add to that, that she had adapted a Scottish folk ballad/fairy-tale (Tam Lin) and made it modern, light, and amusing -- I was completely captivated.

I've read it several more times over the years and it remains one of my favorite books. There are some pacing problems (she spends the first three hundred pages on freshman year and the remaining hundred and fifty on the rest) and she places too much emphasis on what a person's major is, as if it is a determining factor in a personality, which I do not believe is true. But she gets some things dead on - college students talk and think about sex, a lot. I saw some complaints in the other reviews about this, but clearly the authors fail to remember what college was like (or perhaps they were engineering students?) and the novel's theme, like the fairy tale's, is about sex, its repercussions, and the relationship of the partners. It's a wonderful love story, honestly, and I don't usually get caught up in those.

The main reason I love this book, perhaps more than the nostalgic feeling for my own well-remembered red brick buildings on the hill, is that it's about books, and the love of reading. This time, I made a list of all the books and authors that Pamela Dean mentions in the story. I often finish off the last page feeling quite illiterate for not having read most of the works she mentions. The literature has also informed much of my reading over the years. I read and loved Keats' poetry because of this book. I read, and did not enjoy, The Romance of the Rose but liked C.S. Lewis' criticism thanks to Dean. I saw film adaptation of The Revenger's Tragedy with the fabulous Christopher Eccelson (Doctor Who) because of the prominent part it plays in this story, and I knew to avoid The Prophet. For that alone, I would be deeply appreciative of the work.

I've created a bookshelf (Tam Lin) here for all the works and authors that she mentions. How many books do you know that motivate you to do that?(less)

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Apr 10, 2009 Anu rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Young Adults, Adults

Shelves: finished

If you can get over the fact that this is some sort of retrospective paean to Carleton College and the author peggy sue's (whatever that phrase is) herself on to the protagonist, you'll enjoy the book. It's somewhat irritating in that everyone in the book is incredibly boring (and the book largely seems to be about how people in college get into really boring sexual relationships but they're having SEX, so apparently it's super adult and interesting) but then after 8000 pages, all the relevant a...more

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Aug 16, 2010 Margaret rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy-and-science-fiction, mythology-and-fairy-tales, favorites, tam-lin, authors-cd

O I forbid you, maidens a', That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh, For young Tam Lin is there.

These are the first lines of the best-known version of the Scottish ballad Tam Lin, about a young man doomed to be given to hell by the faerie queen, and the young woman who saves him. It's a ballad whose fascination is enduring and which has inspired a number of retellings, of which Pamela Dean's is my favorite (followed closely by Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock).

Dean's versi...more O I forbid you, maidens a', That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh, For young Tam Lin is there.

These are the first lines of the best-known version of the Scottish ballad Tam Lin, about a young man doomed to be given to hell by the faerie queen, and the young woman who saves him. It's a ballad whose fascination is enduring and which has inspired a number of retellings, of which Pamela Dean's is my favorite (followed closely by Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock).

Dean's version of the story is set in the Midwestern college of Blackstock (based on Dean's alma mater, Carleton). When Janet Carter enters college, she and her roommates, Molly and Tina, fall in with a small group of charismatic students, who are all closely connected with the Classics department and its Professor Medeous, an enigmatic but fascinating woman. As Janet wends her way through her four years at college, she learns more and more about Medeous and her followers and eventually finds herself entangled in their intrigues.

Dean spins Janet's story into the tale of Tam Lin in a slow, subtle, and gorgeous way. Hints of the unearthly begin early, from the ghost who throws books from the windows of Janet's dorm, to the mysterious horse riders she encounters on Hallowe'en. Yet much of the book's charm lies in its exploration of college life. It makes me nostalgic, even though I didn't go to a small college and my experiences were nothing like Janet's. The excitement of learning, the thrills of first love, the sheer difference of living on your own, away from your parents; these are all there.

I think I'm particularly drawn to the book because of its interest in literature and in the Classics. I love the bit where Janet and her friends are going through the steam tunnels below campus and come upon some graffiti on the walls: the opening lines of Homer's Iliad, in Greek, whereupon the Classics majors read it aloud and offer a couple of translations (one of which is Chapman's Homer, immortalized in the Keats sonnet).
(less)

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Feb 17, 2012 Amanda rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: young-adult, abandoned, meh

I've read 200+ pages and I'm throwing in the towel. So far, all that's happened is the main character, Janet, has gone to class. Romantic poets and playwrights have been discussed, bunk beds have been dismantled, a bust of Schiller has been stolen, bowls of tapioca have been eaten, the merits of various college professors have been weighed, and everyone--EVERYONE--goes around spouting random bits of poetry and prose. After perusing a few other reviews, I feel confident that it's not going to get...more

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Jan 23, 2011 C. rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, 2011

The very worst thing about this book was the horrifyingly clunky prose, and the author's need to describe everything in exhaustive detail in the most boring way imaginable, like a fourteen-year-old's daily entries in her diary (I kept a diary a lot like this at fourteen - I think it might have been better written). I mean, almost the entire first half of the book described the first term of the first year of the protagonist's college degree. I was so close to giving up at that half-way point. I'...more The very worst thing about this book was the horrifyingly clunky prose, and the author's need to describe everything in exhaustive detail in the most boring way imaginable, like a fourteen-year-old's daily entries in her diary (I kept a diary a lot like this at fourteen - I think it might have been better written). I mean, almost the entire first half of the book described the first term of the first year of the protagonist's college degree. I was so close to giving up at that half-way point. I'm pretty sure I only continued out of hatred, or at the very least spite.

Yeah, so a large part of the reason I didn't like it is because I really have no interest in hearing about the minutiae of life at some liberal arts college in the midwest. I guess I can see how it could be nice for some people to remind them of their college experience (though I can't see how anyone could enjoy this prose), but I'm still in that college experience, and all it does is remind me of the worst things about it. The claustrophobia, the cliquey-ness, the incredibly boring rounds of dates. At least my university is in the middle of a bustling metropolis rather than the middle of nowhere. But I'm nowhere near being able to romanticise anything yet, and may never be able to. Secret: I'm kind of antisocial - more like Danny Chin than Janet, anyway.

I liked the second half of the book much better than the first, because the pace sped up. Though we could still keep up to date with the important events in Janet's life! Such as which subjects she was studying in which terms, and what she thought of them, mainly by reading sweeping and unsubtle statements that once again reminded me of nothing so much as a teenager's diary, when they've got bored or busy and can only be bothered updating once a month. "This term I have English with Mr Dunne. We studied Tim Winton's short stories, I didn't like them at first, but in the end I did." Any writer who is actually good should be able to incorporate this information in the text without having to state it outright.

In fairness, though, I should state that this book really really really made me want to study classical Greek. But this is not by any means the origin of this desire (reading actual Greek texts was that), it just reminded me of it. I also think it's fair to state that Dean really overuses the semi-colon and that was pretty annoying.

The last third of the book, however, was actually almost good, and I read the last chapter fast (it wasn't quite un-putdownable, but I didn't want to put it down, either). Probably this was because she finally started doing some bulk fantasy work, which was really what I was there for. I was disappointed, though, when I read the ballad reprinted at the end (I hadn't read it before), at how literally she interpreted it. It was just Tam Lin, transplanted directly to a midwestern liberal arts college. And I think Pamela Dean was there to write a book about the experience of studying at a midwestern liberal arts college, not to write a serious and interesting retelling of an incredibly powerful fairy tale (of the old sort, sans gossamer wings and little tutus). And frankly, that was disappointing.

__________________________________

I borrowed this from the library on impulse because someone mentioned it on a thread about the Best Book Evah, Fire and Hemlock (I thought it was Mariel but turns out it was someone I don't know). I hate it so far. I hate the way it's written and it's one of those infinitely annoying American books set in liberal arts colleges that seems to be set in a parallel universe very similar to our own, but where nothing quite makes sense. Even the language they use is different, and slighly perplexing. Like all that crap about propping up bookshelves with books?? And all the weird private jokes that seemed to be inserted in there, designed to be entirely comprehensible to everyone except me? And seriously, what's the deal with Peg? She's a sophomore, right? Sophomore means second year, right? (see, I've been carefully studying my vocabulary.) So why would a second year girl be so enthusiastic about making friends with first years? (sorry, I mean freshmen [If I was speaking out loud right now I would have leant heavily and scornfully on that word.].) IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE, but nothing about college life does, really, even in real life, which is why I moved out of the damn place, narrowly escaping insanity.(less)

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Jun 04, 2007 Trin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, american-lit

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'...more

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Mar 04, 2008 Paxnirvana rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: the brave or bored

Shelves: why-oh-why-did-i-read-it

homigawds... This book is a lot of work. I don't mind a lot of work reading, sometimes, but cripes, I honestly don't care what classes she takes each quarter. If it moved the plot, I might, but it doesn't. No. It doesn't.

All the action(!) -- what little there is here, and by "action" I mean "plot" -- happens in the last 150 pages... which I've just reached.

Why did I pick this up again? Oh yeah... recs. *headdesks*

Update:

DONE. Finally. *sighs deeply*

Unfullfilling ending. Just. Ends. Gods. After s...more

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May 30, 2007 Cat rated it 2 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the beginning SO much. Dean well establishes the texture of college life, and I especially enjoyed the roommate tensions. I thought I was going to love the book, but as time went on, I was worn down by the novel's structure...which delays plot gratification till the very very end. Also, the heavy-handed allusions outweighed even the pretentiousness of my college friends and me...which, at that point in life, was quite pronounced indeed. :-) Enjoyable, but okay rather than awesome. Star...more

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Aug 27, 2012 Molly rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

A retelling of the 16th-century Scottish ballad by that name, set in a 1970s Liberal Arts college in Minnesota – because every story must eventually be retold to be about American teenagers.

I'm a big ballad nerd, so it was cool seeing how the novel fit into the story, but I have to admit, I really hated this book to begin with. The first few scene-setting chapters read like they were written expressly for the notional bookish 13-year-old girl, dreaming of college (and, in places, by her). Janet...more

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Jul 21, 2010 Ceridwen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Ceridwen by: Elizabeth

Shelves: america-and-environs, faeries, fantasy, books-about-books, l-etoile-du-nord, insomnia

About halfway through my read, my husband asked me about this, and I told him, "It's boring." This is not exactly true; it's not boring. But I meant "boring" the way my kids mean when, in the middle of the summer doldrums of popsicles, long slow evenings, and dirt-black feet from running barefoot, they come to me and say, "I'm bored." They are not bored. In thirty years, they will mark this time as idyllic, fairy-edged, all of those odd memories of walking out to go to daycamp, and seeing the my...more About halfway through my read, my husband asked me about this, and I told him, "It's boring." This is not exactly true; it's not boring. But I meant "boring" the way my kids mean when, in the middle of the summer doldrums of popsicles, long slow evenings, and dirt-black feet from running barefoot, they come to me and say, "I'm bored." They are not bored. In thirty years, they will mark this time as idyllic, fairy-edged, all of those odd memories of walking out to go to daycamp, and seeing the mysterious rabbit who lives under our porch disappear into the overgrown ivy; or the sound of the sand as it crunches while they make messes and castles and castle-messes; or the quality of the light while the boy sits in his evening-lit bedroom and reads past his bedtime. It's boring, but it's magic.

I'm old enough for my early college years to be magic, in a similar way. I don't think they were perfect times, in any way. I have this hard image of my roommate coming back from break, hysterically weird, and drinking herself into a truly upsetting level of inebriation. She was laughing hysterically, and I can still see her roll forward, laughing, and in that moment I felt the laughter shift, and then it all came out as tears, as howls. She went home over break to learn her mother had tried to kill herself. Or the otherworldly girl across the hall, damaged, touched, beautiful, who didn't so much attempt suicide as enact a "suicidal gesture" in the odd, post-Freudian nomenclature of our times. I sat with her when she came back, arms bandaged, and we talked about how hard it was to communicate, while her plump, happy music major roommate snored softly. We whispered, so as not to wake her up.

This is trite, and boring, but it was also unreal/real in way. I've never had a time in my life so odd and discombobulated. Dean captures the hell out of this feeling: the discomfort, the isolation while being completely cocooned in a isolated society. She snares all the mundanity, like the endless discussions of which hellish dorm to eat at, or the discussions of campus furniture, or the bathroom graffiti, or a hundred other boring things. This also takes place in my home state, not far from where I live, and Dean's descriptions of the roll of the seasons, the quality of February, matched with my own experience in a way that made it feel like she was talking to me alone. I feel jealous of this story, not in the sense that I wish I wrote it, although that would be nice, but in the sense that I feel I have lived it, and I don't want to share this experience. A freshman is a special thing, unique, even while she is common as rain. I don't want to share, even though I know my experience is shared, because I am still me, alone. I'm teetering on the edge of making fun of me here, but I will refrain, as Dean does. I may have been a goose, and a common goose, but I waddled as best I could.

This is the kind of book that is made by its ending. At that mid-point, I also said to my husband that I knew Dean was going somewhere with it all, and she did. Another thing I remember about my early college years was the sense of the connectedness of it all: a geology class that hit on Lyell, which rolled into the works of Keats, who came after Milton, who had something to do with Plato and Tolstoy and Akhmatova standing at the prison where her son languished, and Darwin's pigeons, and Chuang Tzu's butterfly and god know what all. I have never since argued so passionately about the quality of the light in a cave, and while I'm happy I don't care anymore, I love that I can remember the intensity of such arguments. Dean nails this too.

And love. I'm half-tempted to tell stories of that college boyfriend, who was not more real than my high school boyfriend, but there are moments there: half-drunk from lack of sleep from that all-nighter, and laughing with him on the stairs to the dorm as the senior streakers went by; the way he gleamed when he talked about the whaling section of Moby Dick, or R.E.M.; the time he wrote out John Donne's "The Bait" for me, as a love poem; the way he walked on his toes. We were playing at something that wasn't real yet, but it would be, later, when I decided to leave that school, and he came to Minneapolis and was diminished, and left and we never spoke again. Real is awful. Real is the worst thing there is. But unreal has its dangers too, and Dean writes that conflict with the lightest hand I have ever encountered, and my memories streak past me in the dark, naked, on their way to matriculation and the hard, unfocused world of the real. (less)

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Jun 22, 2008 GraceAnne rated it 5 of 5 stars

I simply adored this book, but I confess when I tried to teach it (In YA Lit, in the Reimagined Fairytales and Other Magicks unit) most of my students just didn't get it. They didn't get the lusciousness of the school setting, nor the magic of the late fantasy. Ah well.

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Aug 09, 2012 Emma rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: retellings, united-states, contemporary, 1-star, books-about-books, in-which-i-rant

Gah!!

I almost never give 1 star to books I've actually finished, because they're bound to have some redeeming quality that will at least bring the rating up to 2. But the best I can say about this one is that it's not offensive--in fact, I share many of the author's opinions--and that the prose was at least competent enough for me to continue reading, but that isn't very redeeming when it so utterly failed to entertain that I threw it against a wall. (I really did!)

The (alleged!) premise of this...more

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Apr 24, 2009 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fairy, scotland, fantasy-urban, fantasy-fairy-tales-influ

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 28, 2008 Sasha rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, fiction, feminism, philosophical, romance

This is a book I wish I could have liked. And yet don't feel bad at all about loathing. I think that describing one of the male protagonists as madly attractive and then spending much of the book having to imagine him (unironically) with billowing, ruffled front silk blouses was beyond my capabilities to suspend disbelief. Madly attractive and billowing silk blouses on an early 1970's college campus doesn't work for me. Especially with the mad quoting of great literature. Jennifer Crusie quoting...more

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Aug 17, 2008 linnea rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: academicnovels, girlswhodothings, smartgirlsinamerica, fairytales

Okay, my original review is below, but after thinking about it for a few weeks I realized I liked this book more than I thought. It's really stuck with me and kind of framed my thoughts. Also it's that kind of book that reminds me who I am, like L'Engle or McKinley books usually do, the ones I have to re-read every few years or so. I've also gone and read Dean's Juniper Gentian and Rosemary in the meantime and realized that these characters might be friends. They've certainly introduced me to a...more

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May 19, 2008 Lisa Dee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: chicklit

First off, let me say that I had the worst time putting this book down. Dean's ability to write characters that infiltrate the readers' consciousness and stay with them long after the last page has been turned over is undeniable.

I found myself making comparisons to Marylin French's The Women's Room throughout: both are coming of age stories about strong women undertaking a liberal arts education at the end of the sixties / start of the seventies. Indeed, that is what this novel *is* - it isn't

...more

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Jan 17, 2008 Brownbetty rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Literate people

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. 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 Dorothy L. Sayers in the wealth of casual allusions to fairly obscure texts.

I've never read a book that I wanted so little...more 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 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 L'engle's 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.(less)

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Jan 04, 2008 Kristen rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fairy-tales

So I'm not sure how I feel on this book. I know the basic gist of the Tam Lin story, and that's about it.

This version takes place in the early '70s. And while I know the vernacular has changed since then, I have a hard time believing that college students were constantly quoting Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, etc. (Nowadays I figure we're lucky if kids have even heard of all of them!)

It seemed like the book took forever to get to the part where the original tale 'kicked in'. I even read the back co...more

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Feb 14, 2013 Leonie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy

This is a book for English majors or people who wish they were English majors. A lot of people seem very disappointed and let down by this. I think it's okay for an author to write for such a specific audience, though I agree it's better if everyone understands who the book is written for first off. I knew this was more about people talking about books than the ballad retelling. The problem for me was not the lack of fantasy, just that I thought it wasn't a very good book about people talking ab...more

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Jan 15, 2013 Isana rated it 2 of 5 stars

Before I read this, I heard that it was polarizing--either you loved it or you hated it.

I don't exactly hate it, but I don't love (or like it) either.

It's a great concept--a modern retelling of the Tam Lin ballad that takes place on a college campus, and one I've seen done before on various Internet incarnations, but not quite well. I'll give Pamela Dean this: she's a terrific writer when it comes to details and setting the scene. I felt like I was in the 1970s Midwest, but I also felt like it...more

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Jun 19, 2012 Hazel rated it 3 of 5 stars

I almost aborted this around Chapter 2, because it seemed to be a story about a girl going to school. Both my girlhood and my schooldays are too far in the past for this to appeal. But I kept on, and was rewarded with a sense of nostalgia for the liberal-arts education I never had. Dean made me regret my physics degree and consider whether the OU would let me do a course or two on literature. Her story is light on plot, and the folk-tale/faery-connection both slight and obvious. Her pacing is un...more

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Apr 09, 2012 C.D. rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Nerds. Book Lovers. Literature Students. Fantasy Fans.

Recommended to C.D. by: Tansy Rayner Roberts

Tam Lin is one of those few books that seems... whole. It seems not to have been written, but just to have been dropped from the sky by some benevolent diety who knows I love literary allusions, college life and brisk prose.

It's just... such a nerd's paradise of a novel. Example:

When Janet and her newfound college friends find an Iliad quote in a tunnel on their first day of school, they start arguing over the best translation of the greek, and then exchange quotations for a few lines, before e...more

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Mar 19, 2012 Alex M. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy-and-sci-fi, kindle, reread, young-adult

This is one of those books I read when I was about 14 or 15 and it's stuck with me for forever. But when I was 14, a lot of this went over my head. Like, the college-y feeling and a lot of the literary allusions, so this was 100 times better to reread. I had an awesome time, since basically this book was written for me. Like, all the literary allusions felt like private jokes I got to share with Dean (and Janet too) and oh, Blackstone. I know Blackstone is based on Carleton, but it FEELS like Mo...more

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Mar 09, 2012 Terri Kempton rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is both blazingly bad and really fun. If you went to Carleton College, this is practically required reading - not only is this location "somewhat based on Carleton," the book is practically a love letter to Carleton, recreating the experience through meaningless details that none but a Carl could love. Nothing brings back rosy academic memories quite so much as traying, antics with Schiller, moaning about the ugliness of Musser, concerts at the Cave, longs walks in the Arb, and freshme...more This book is both blazingly bad and really fun. If you went to Carleton College, this is practically required reading - not only is this location "somewhat based on Carleton," the book is practically a love letter to Carleton, recreating the experience through meaningless details that none but a Carl could love. Nothing brings back rosy academic memories quite so much as traying, antics with Schiller, moaning about the ugliness of Musser, concerts at the Cave, longs walks in the Arb, and freshmen who feel endlessly quoting poetry makes them seem wise and intellectual. If, however, you are one of the millions of people who did NOT attend Carleton, and that last sentence seemed like jibberish... well, there's little point in reading the book.

Dean's retelling of Tam Lin is surprisingly straightforward. Beautiful boys, a Fairy Queen, a last-minute save by the girl who loves him. The problems lie not in the original ballad but in Dean's inability to engage an audience along the journey. Her writing reads like the journal of a 14-year old girl who documents every logistical detail in her life and expects it to be relevant later on. I remember the same sort of obsession with minutiae in Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, so it seems to be Dean's style. But fair warning: in this book you'll have to wade through scheduling difficulties of classes for every term (and there are 3 a year at Carleton) for the protagonist's entire collegiate career. You will follow alongside her through boring English lit lectures and have to listen to her whining about the clunky writing in Anthro texts so much it will remind you of why you don't talk to your roommate from freshman year much anymore. Readers drown in uninteresting details and don't get enough of anything else: we needed real character development, drama, and perhaps most importantly a believable chemistry and love story between the two lead characters.

This book is so immersed in Carleton, even Dean's writing sounds like that certain type of student, dying to be a writer, maybe majoring in Theater instead, who throws in every flowery phrase and poetic device they can think of to try to sound profound. Like instead of writing "father" more than twice on a page of dialogue, she names him as "the male parent." While this is awesomely bad (seriously, I love a train-wreck book), it is a missed opportunity to give us depth where it matters: the connections between characters, the emotion we could have tapped into, or creating a world of Fairy/magic/ghosts/etc as a vivid as her details about day to day college life.

So why three stars? I miss my Carleton. This allowed me to visit for a while, and not just superficially for the normal student memories but also those moments of supreme creepiness while standing in the Arb alone on certain nights. For that experience, combined with disastrous writing, I'll confess that I really enjoyed myself and tore through this book quickly. (less)

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Aug 08, 2011 Eleanor rated it 2 of 5 stars

So I really love the ballad of Tam Lin, I find it rather interesting, which is why I decided to read this version. The book just went on and on and didn't really seem to get started until the end. The first 300 pages or so describes the protagonist's first year at college and then we actually start getting into the ballad in the last 150, and really only the last 50 of those 150 pages. I also happen to love literature and the classics and I've studied Ancient Greek and have a pretty decent liber...more

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Jul 27, 2011 Kaia Sand added it

I felt that it took WAY too long to get to the main action in this book. I spent the majority of the book wondering when the action was going to start. There were funny and witty passages, but I felt like there were way too many references to works of English and classical literature that I've never read. I have a feeling that I would have enjoyed the book more had I read all the works to which the characters allude (as I generally enjoyed the references to the few books I HAD read), but I feel...more

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May 26, 2011 Sarah Sullivan rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: young-adult

Absolutely awful. One of the most pretentious books I've ever read. Reading this book was like freshman year of college, hanging around people who are trying really hard to prove how smart and authentic they are. I get that this was probably a choice, since the main characters are college freshmen. But I didn't like it when I was living it, so I sure don't want to read about it. Also, way too long. Hundreds of pages too long. And, I know the book was written in the early 90s and set in the 70s,...more

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Jan 13, 2011 Deborah Ross rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book sat on my TBR bookcase for far too long, in part because the Thomas Canty cover strongly suggested a "Fairyland" setting (aided and abetted by the book's being part of the "The Fairy Tale Series," edited by Terri Windling), of which I had read far too much recently, much of it YA. When I finally did pick it up, I was utterly lost. While TAM LIN is indeed a retelling of the old ballad and does indeed feature young adult characters, the heart of the story is the insular world of a small...more

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Nov 07, 2010 Juushika rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: status-borrowed

In the 1970s, Janet begins at Midwest liberal arts Blackstock College, and so enters a world of unusual students, burgeoning love, intense academia, and perhaps even fairies. Tam Lin, intended to be a retelling of the Scottish ballad of the same name, is both a surprising success and a regretful disappointmentin both cases, perhaps attributable to its particular style of fairy tale retelling. Of its 450 pages, only the last 50 reenact the source material; the rest of the book is given over to...more In the 1970s, Janet begins at Midwest liberal arts Blackstock College, and so enters a world of unusual students, burgeoning love, intense academia, and perhaps even fairies. Tam Lin, intended to be a retelling of the Scottish ballad of the same name, is both a surprising success and a regretful disappointmentin both cases, perhaps attributable to its particular style of fairy tale retelling. Of its 450 pages, only the last 50 reenact the source material; the rest of the book is given over to Blackstock college and its students. In this way, Tam Lin is largely a fantasy of manners: an academic dreamland where the classes are inspiring, the students brilliant, and literary quotation peppers dialog and replaces graffiti; the cast is composed of a colorful handful of students, navigating the complexities of romantic entanglement and the rigors of education. It's so complex and clever to be self-indulgent leaning towards twee: this is the college education that romantic academics wish to have, and it's hardly convincing as the real thing. Yet it's such beautiful wish fulfillment that it's a joy to reada joy compromised by the fact that, despite its brilliance and complexity, there's little here which is real enough to latch on to, but a joy nonetheless.

Peppered as it is by anachronisms and ghosts, constantly hinting at some fantasy on the edge of reality, the bulk of Tam Lin is also a convincing setup for the fairy tale to comeyet for those first 400 pages, Dean shies away from explicit fantasy. Creating and then denying expectation emphasizes the enjoyable nuance of the fantasy of manners, provides a solid base to support believable fantasy, and keeps anticipation high, and when that fantasy finally arrives it is welcome and initially convicingbut the fairy tale comes so quick and to the letter, filling the last 50 pages with a brief and near-literal reenactment of the original ballad, ending abruptly upon the ballad's completion, that it doesn't fulfill the expectations raised by all that anticipation. Perhaps Tam Lin ought not be a retelling of Tam Lin. It's clever and indulgent, if ultimately unsubstantial, as a fantasy of manners, and it's ready to blossom into rich explicit fantasy, but as a retelling of Tam Lin it is sudden and insufficientthe retelling is merely an ending which, while not out of place, is largely tacked on. It begs better integration and resolution, and the same care and detail given to the rest of the book. As it is, "Tam Lin" may be on the cover but there's just not enough of it in the book, and so Pamela Dean's Tam Lin is gorgeous, intelligent, indulgent, but leaves something to be desired. I recommend it, but I wish that I could do so without reservation: there's so much here to enjoy, and I certainly did, but the book's successes also serve to make its failures more visible and regrettable by comparison.(less)

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About Pamela Dean

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Books by Pamela Dean

The Secret Country (The Secret Country, #1)

The Hidden Land (The Secret Country, #2)

The Whim of the Dragon (The Secret Country, #3)

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Quotes from Tam Lin

“Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?” — 19 people liked it

“At the moment, if you asked me, I would say that this book is about keeping the heart of flesh in a world that wants to put in a heart of stone; and about how, regardless of the accusations regularly flung at them from all quarters, learning and literature can help their adherents accomplish that.” — 2 people liked it

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