Do you feel too much? Do you feel too real?

[sovay]

I ATE'NT DEAD.

I swear.

Comments

[sovay]

Pamela Dean is very good. I'm in an odd situation with her Tam Lin, because it's not actually my favorite retelling of the ballad: I much prefer Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, or Alan Garner's Red Shift. If Dean's novel had ben a novella, I think it might have been a marvelous retelling. But the story is spread too thin. As it is, I think it's a marvelous university novel that happens to have some "Tam Lin" cropping up in the plot from time to time. (I read it my freshman year of college, which was particularly amusing given that I then went on to major in Classics.) In some ways, I think Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary is more successful as a retelling, even though the ballad again doesn't make a strong appearance until the very end of the novel—the weirdness is simultaneously more submerged and more present throughout. And I am extremely fond of her stories about the Benedicti family, from the Liavek anthologies. That may be all of hers that I've read; I'm waiting for more.