Tam Lin

Tam Lin Pamela Dean Date: 01 April, 1992   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Fantasy

I held off reading this for as long as I could. This is one of my favorite novels of all time, and it deserves to be started in the fall, when thoughts turn to school.

To be honest, I didn't like it this much the first time I'd read it. It was good enough, but I didn't have the context. The novel is set in the early 1970s at a small college in Minnesota, and is a spot-on depiction of the way that college feels... and if you have not been to college, you may be forgiven for not understanding the wonder of this novel.

She even got traying— sledding down hills on plastic trays absconded from the cafeteria. If you went to college someplace where it didn't snow, well, you missed out.

At any rate, the fantasy aspect of the novel is woven through the book, but is so subtle as to be all but missed until the end, unless you're like my friend the Shakespeare nut who figured it out the moment certain characters were intorduced. (Pamela Dean is big on dropping English quotations into her works, not just Shakespeare but Tourneur, Webster, St. Paul...)

So if you're not an English geek, you may need to read it twice. At least.