28. Tam Lin

By Pamela Dean (456 pp.)

I stuck this back on the bookshelf and almost forgot to put it on my list.

What happened? I read 6 books in August and barely read one in September. October isn't going to be much better.

This is another Tina Connolly recommendation. It's set in the early 1970's at a small college in Minnesota and is mostly about the protagonist Janet's freshman year of college. In incredible detail: dealing with roommates, what they wore, doing homework, reciting poems, going to the dining hall, busy-bodying everybody's love life. The story is a retelling of Tam Lin which is a Scottish ballad or ode or lament or whatever fancy literary term. The story continues through Janet's senior year where a speculative element gets thrown in.

I have mixed feelings about the book.The details of college life were fascinating in that they were completely alien to my own, but also got a bit tedious. The speculative element was interesting but not developed as much as I would have liked. Overall, I kept thinking about it after I finished so success.