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4.0étoiles sur 5
reread before commenting, Mai 18 2003
Although I was immediately interested in Dean's characters, when I finished the first time, I wondered why she had included so many seemingly useless situations and dialogues. While Dominic is mentioned from the beginning, he and his project don't become important until the last fifty pages or so. When I reread the book again, however, I came to see how the absense of Gentian's real life (her conversations with Becky, her arguments with her sisters, etc) really emphasizes how lost she is when she works on Dominic's project. Certainly, I can see that Dean should have cut down the inital few hundred pages, but on closer inspection I see how important much of that "pre-project" life is.
Many people have remarked on how unlikely it is that Gentian and her friends/sisters would be such intellectuals at such a young age. While I do agree that this is very unlikely (most of the middle school girls I know do not speak so eloquently), I thought that this made her characters more interesting. They weren't the average teenage girls you could read about in any novel. I can definitely see how some people would become irritated with that aspect of the book, but I didn't find the characters to be annoyingly precocious--just intellectuals. My advise would be to give the book another try before just tossing it away. You might be surprised at what you missed the first time through.
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1.0étoiles sur 5
What was that?, Mars 15 2003
After checking out The Dubious Hills from my local library and loving it, I immediately checked out the only other Pamela Dean book that they have, that obviously being this one. I almost never put it down and got through it in a few hours, not because the plot was that absorbing, but because I was trying to find out what the plot was. There's a lot of poetry and quotes, there's a lot of astronomy, there's a lot of interaction between Gentian and her friends . . but when the book was over I still didn't know who Dominic was or why he did anything that he had done.
Most of the book is about the life of Gentian Merriweather, an atheist astronomer who has a group of friends who refer to themselves as the Giant Ants. Sure, there's the weird guy who lives next door to her in an ugly red house, but that's really not the main focus. And then, suddenly, on page 298 (out of 350) Dominic and his 'science project' become the main focus of the story.
Although I really tried to like this book, I finished it with the impression that it was boring, confusing, and full of characters that I didn't like and couldn't relate to.
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3.0étoiles sur 5
Strange, Déc 29 2002
I've read several Pamela Dean books in the past, and so I was prepared for her style; it didn't bother me much that people quoted too often, or that the book was long on characterization and mood but short on plot, or that the ending swooped in out of the ether when I was least expecting it. I was ready for those things to be the case, so they didn't disappoint me. I opened the book hoping for a story like Dean's earlier _Tam Lin_, full of interesting characters, with a subtle but looming sense of the supernatural. I didn't like JG&R as much as Tam Lin, though. For starters, I didn't feel like we got to know Gentian and her friends and family as well as we got to know Janet's circle; I wanted to know more about these people, but I always felt a little like a spectator. Then, I couldn't understand why Gentian liked Dominic. Hormones or no, beauty or no, any self-respecting girl would have become annoyed with him when she noticed that he almost NEVER said anything but quotes (people say the other characters quote too much, but it was Dominic who truly crossed the line). And the annoyance would have turned to revulsion when he made the racist comments about her friend Alma. I just don't buy into Gentian's continuued fascination with him. I would have disliked him intensely. Finally, I agree with the reviewer below who says the ending is unfair to Gentian; she is the one who defeated the evil, but it seems like she is punished rather than rewarded for it. I had read the relevant ballad, "Riddles Wisely Expounded", before reading JG&R. I'm not sure whether that had a good or bad effect on my reading experience. On one hand, the denouement probably would have made less sense to me if I hadn't read the ballad; on the other hand, it was a spoiler of sorts. I would certainly recommend reading the ballad after reading the book, just to make sense of things. _Tam Lin_ contained a copy of its ballad; I wish this book did as well. One more comment on Dominic's quoting: Though it made him an extremely annoying character, I did like the possible implications of that move by Dean. If Dominic is in fact the mythological personage he is implied to be, it's tantalizing to think that he is just made up of the thoughts of human beings, accumulated over the years, and has no existence outside of the human imagination. That aspect of the story will definitely stick in my mind for a long time.
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