Tam Lin: Fairy Tales #2

I enjoyed this book and have read it twice over the years, but I won't be rushing to re-read it again. It does start off slowly, with a lot of details about university life. Gradually, we get some hints that people aren't what they seem. In the end, elements of the Tam Lin tale appear.

*If you like Tam Lin stories, this book will disgust you* First, this is not a Tom Lin story at all. It is a boring, boring, boring strange, disconnected piece of writing that latches on to the Tam Lin details at the very end of this strange, tediously disconnected tale--in an incredibly unsatisfying way! In this author's bent mind, Janet and Thomas don't like each other very much but have a casual one-time fling that leads to her pregnancy. While he's telling her about the tiend to hell, she's thinking up boring quotes from authors no one knows (and the entire book is like that) and she's yelling at him. Such as strange excuse for a novel. Though written in third person, it's almost as if you're reading a daily journal of first year college life, where only the most mundane details and conversations were recorded, about a lot of unlikable characters in a terribly boring setting, which is described literally ad nauseam.

I had been curious about the ballad of Tam Lin and the reviews I read encouraged me to purchase this book. I don't know how to express my disappointment. I'm not sure if any book has ever been less engaging. The author includes a version of the original Tam Lin ballad of 42 stanzas. Her rendition goes on for over 450 pages! I had the strength to endure only 45 pages.

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.

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.

I was disappointed the first time I read this. While it was a very good novel about college life in the early 70s, I wanted to read a novel based on a fairy tale/folk legend. I enjoyed the literary dialogue bantered back and forth among the characters (believe it or not, my friends and I do speak this way; the curse of the overeducated!)Curiosity had me turning back to the book a second time, and suddenly the world I blundered into was much richer. Without having the expectations of gnomes and wishes and magical events that I had the first time, the subtler wonders of this book unfolded. Tiny clues lead up to the suddenly otherworldly ending, ones that can't be understood on the first read-through.Pamela Dean has to be a outstanding wordsmith, to manage to keep me interested through a 10 page decription of a uninspiring 17th century play, among other things. The pace may be slow, but it gives you a chance to watch the lovely scenary go by. For that reason, I love this book more every time I read it.

I read Tam Lin by chance, as it was recommended to me by a friend who happened to pick it up at the library out of the blue. All I can say is- thank goodness she did. Tam Lin is one of the best books I've ever read, and I'm quite critical. The characters are wonderful, real- those who wrote that they didn't like the book because Janet was "annoying" seem to be missing the point that only a well-written character can be human enough to be annoying sometimes. The plot develops at a slow, steady pace, which often I find irritating. Not this story- it was addictive from the first page. When I finished I went back to the beginning and read it again. When I'm craving good, pleasurable writing, I open my copy and start reading at random. Never have I found a book so easily quotable, as Dean's writing style is lyrical and crafted with almost impossible perfection. Lastly, I would read Tam Lin if only for the literary references- had I not read Tam Lin, I doubt I would have read The Lady's Not For Burning.