Tam Lin: Amazon.ca: Pamela Dean, Windling Terri: Books

Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

This delightful new entry in the Fairy Tale series, featuring children's classics refashioned for adult audiences, adapts the eponymous Scottish ballad to a Midwestern university setting. In the early '70s, scholarly Janet Carter enters Blackstock College as an English major. She and roommates Christina and Molly fall in with an attractive, often eccentric group of classics students who circle around Professor Medeous, a spectacular, enigmatic redheaded woman. The girls pair off with young male classicists, Janet beginning an affair with Nicholas Tooley, whose vast familiarity with Shakespeare and often distant approach to intimacy disturb her. When the liaison ends, she takes up with the young man formerly attached to Christina. The ghost of a pregnant student who committed suicide, mysterious late-night horseback forays led by Professor Medeous and the appearance in a list of Shakespeare's actors of the names of three of the Classics Department scholars urge Janet on a dangerous quest to save her lover. Dean ( The Whim of the Dragon ) has written a quintessential college novel, anchoring its fantastic elements in a solid, engaging reality.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The medieval Scottish ballad of a young woman who rescues her love from the queen of faerie undergoes a radical but convincing transformation as fantasy author Dean ( The Secret Country ) updates the story to modern times and relocates it to a Minnesota college campus. The fifth volume in the "Fairy Tale Series," which includes Steven Brust's The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars ( LJ 3/15/87) and Patricia Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red (Tor Bks., 1989), vividly portrays a classic tale of love that spans the border between the worlds. Recommended.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

87 Reviews

5 star:		(56)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

Average Customer Review

4.2 out of 5 stars (87 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely fantastic, Feb 6 2001

By

Jody M. Keene (the South) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Tam Lin (Mass Market Paperback)

I first read Tam Lin, well, I can't remember when. I've read it over and over since then, though, and each time I pick out new clues, new hints, new allusions, new jokes . . . This is a textbook example of a LAYERED novel.

As many other reviewers have pointed out, understanding this book can hinge on a liberal arts education. I had one, I'm happy to say--we even operated on a trimester system, just like Blackstock, the college Janet attends in the novel (which is loosely based on Carleton College in Minnesota--after reading this book, I seriously considering transfering there).

Now. The ending IS a bit rushed. I tallied it up once: Janet's freshman year takes up very nearly one half of the book, while her other three years take up progressively fewer pages. The "fairy tale" ending gets a similarly rushed treatment, but I don't think that necessarily detracts from the story as a whole, especially if you're familiar with the Tam Lin ballad--which I wasn't when I first read it, and I still loved it.

If you can find it, buy it. This isn't a book to be borrowed from the library and read once--you'll never catch everything. Buy it, read it, read it again, and then read it once more. After a year or so, read it again.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved it, but you might not..., Aug 24 2000

By

Marcy L. Thompson (Sammamish, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Tam Lin (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is full of lovely language, subtle references to the ballad of Tam Lin, unadulterated nostalgia for life at a liberal arts college in the 1970s, and characters who are flawed but endearing. I wore out one copy of this book and had to buy a second, which disappeared into a friend's library, so I had to buy a third. I reread it at least once a year, or whenever I want to read a beautifully written book which will reveal more on each successive reading.

However, lots of people hate this book. Some of the people who hate this book are people whose literary tastes I otherwise trust implicitly. It's hard to know why they hate it. They say they hate the cardboard characters (but the characters seemed to me to be both wonderful evocations of the archtypes they represented and also quite well-drawn as individuals). They say the book is pretentious (but I went to school with a bunch of people who talked like that -- we outgrew it, but the dialogue sang to me). They say the fairy tale is just nailed onto the ending of the book (but if you look, the details of the ballad are present from the first page -- and surely one of the things Dean is trying to say is that the fantastic has as its context the mundane). They say the writing is wooden (I disagree).

If you love lanugage, if you were ever a somewhat pretentious young intellectual, if you want to remember what it felt like to be 18 years old at a liberal arts college (and you didn't have to go to Carleton to feel the tug of nostalgia), you will probably like this book. But if you don't, you will be in good company.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Maybe you need 2 copies of this one, Mar 6 2004

By

Mom with many books (Richmond, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tam Lin (Mass Market Paperback)

I liked this book so much that when I had loaned my copy out, I borrowed my library's copy several times till I got my own back. The book was not what I expected when I picked it up - the modern-day (well, 1970's still feels modern-day to me, okay?) setting was a surprise, and the first time I read it I kept expecting a dissolve to fairyland. Despite the unexpected setting, I've returned again and again to this story of tangled relationships. The college situations rang true, and in fact made me homesick for my college town. Another reviewer mentioned Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, and Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, both of which I heartily agree are wonderful variants from the same root stock as Tam Lin. Try all three!

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars nya-nya-nya-nya I WENT to the college in the book
And Carleton is just as wonderful, awesome, and invigorating as the college in the novel. I first read Tam Lin while in High School and immediately decided to go to the college... Read more

Published on Oct 14 2003 by J. Blake

4.0 out of 5 stars A decent novel, so-so retelling of 'Tam Lin'
I've recently started reading every version of Tam Lin I can get my hands on, and this is the most recent discovery of mine. Read more

Published on Mar 1 2003