The Secret Country (1985)

Having immensely enjoyed one of Dean's other works, Tam Lin, I was looking forward to reading this, and I was disappointed that I didn't find it all that interesting. I kept waiting for the story to get going, even as I could see that I was past the halfway point of the book and that this was probably about as gripping as it was ever going to get. The children already know who the people in the Secret Country are and what's "supposed" to happen because they've been acting it out as a play for years, so there's not much for them to discover about this world, and it felt like the author forgot that the readers wouldn't know all this as well as the children do. This is the first book in a trilogy. In the last chapters, the children begin to really grapple with deeper mysteries—wondering if they can change the story and why they've been able to come here—and in the hopes that these issues will be developed further, I'm going to give the second book a chance at some point. ( )

Smart and fun. Five cousins stumble into a fantasy world almost exactly like the one they've been pretending to inhabit for years--but this world veers dangerously away from their stories even as it seems to push them to the tragic conclusion they created. Chock full of allusions and general fourth-wall shenanigans. ( )

I tried my hardest to finish this book, but I felt as if Dean just made up things as she went along. I know it's a fantasy book, but the way she put some of the "facts" of the secret world in there, it seemed so bland, and like she put forth no effort. I got all the way to chapter 8 and had to stop, I usually read a book like this in about two hours...it's been two weeks and I just can't get into it.

I do not recommend this book at all. ( )

The premise of this one is very interesting, but I ended up not finishing it. The writing is pretty good, and the characters interesting enough, but it didn't really draw me in. I feel a lot like maybe there was some giant, important Something I was missing out on, that would have made it very compelling - at first I thought that perhaps my book was a misprint and the beginning was left out. It just feels a bit...incomplete. ( )

Um. I like a couple of Pamela Dean's other books so much, Dubious Hills and Tam Lin, that my expectations for this were a little high. But it seemed a fairly ordinary fantasy crossover novel. Some nice touches, the bits about the reality of the world, the one cousin's disbelief, the characters - but nothing particularly deep. ( )