Tamsin

With Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle tells a tale full of English myths from the perspective of 13-year-old Jenny Gluckstien. Jenny's life is turned upside down when her mother remarries and moves their small family from New York City to a farm in the English countryside. Suddenly finding herself with a new stepdad and two step brothers in a whole new country, Jenny reacts about as poorly as you can imagine, making herself quite a pain for everyone around her. Naturally, the manor and surrounding grounds is haunted by all sorts of creatures, including the ghost of a young girl who has been trapped on the estate since she died roughly 300 years ago. Jenny gradually finds herself pulled into the mystery of surrounding Stourhead Farm and the show more creatures of the night that live there.

I think this is one of those stories people will either love or hate. I'm firmly in the "loved it" camp. The tale moves at a slow and deliberate pace as we're introduced to Jenny and her life in New York. Jenny is quite the character! I remember what it was like being an teenage girl with plenty of angst and I'm impressed with how well Beagle was able to capture that feeling without making me hate her. Deliberately making yourself difficult as a passive aggressive way to deal with life? Yeah, I remember that to. This story is firmly YA in that regard so if you don't enjoy reading teenage angst, you should probably avoid this book.

The farm is quite haunted. I loved how Beagle pulled out so many local myths to inhabit Stourhead. Even though it was published in 1999, the book reads like "timeless" children's literature. Jenny and the haunts on the farm feel like they could have come out of virtually any time period prior to the internet age.

The story was absolutely delightful. Beagle writes such beautiful and atmospheric prose that I found myself completely whisked away into the night world of Stourhead Farm. I truly enjoyed my time getting to know Jenny, Tamsin, Mister Cat and all the creatures she encounters as Jenny unravels what is keeping Tamsin from moving on. I was sad when the story ended as I really wasn't ready to leave Stourhead. show less

It is not often that a book - and a fantasy book at that - frightens me, but this book did just that. The story is incredibly written and I think its mild horror comes from the fact that it seems to touch on Truth. Truth regarding the danger in the creatures of the wild darkness, which all human legend, myth, and folklore comes from. Many don't have any belief in the Other now a days, but there is a reason why these stories come into being in the first place. Beagle is clearly a fantasist of the first class, and I look forward to exploring his works further.

A ghost story! A rather peculiar one actually, because it incorporates most of the hallmarks of Gothic fiction (history and death and a touch of romance) while substituting in the darkness of traditional English magical lore for horror, and it uses a transplanted-to-rural-Dorset-from-NYC young girl to frame the ghostly part of the story with a modern setting and growth into one's future self.

I found it all quite compelling, and loved the way it balanced traditional English-feeling real and unreal mythos with the pitch-perfect sulky voice of our teen narrator Jenny.

Count me among the readers who found this fantastic. I really liked that Beagle took a different route from many writers by *not* plunging right away into the more supernatural elements of the plot. What is initially lost in pacing is more than made up for by the wonderfully evocative atmosphere and the fully-fleshed out and appealing characters; since I love history, the historical fictional parts are a bonus. The lead, Jenny, is drawn particularly well (honestly and hilariously analyzing her 13-year-old self); too bad there aren't any sequels, as I'd love to spend more time in her world.

I remember being an adolescent girl. That seems normal enough, because I was one for several years. It's a bit scarier that Peter Beagle seems to remember being an adolescent girl.

Jenny Gluckstein is thirteen years old, and living with her divorced mother, a music teacher in New York, and visiting regularly with her father, an opera singer. She's a bit of a misfit at school, which most adolescents are, but she has two friends she spends a lot of time with, and she has a cat, Mister Cat.

And then her mother announces she's marrying her boyfriend, Evan McHugh, and that she and Jenny are moving to England with him. She'll be leaving her friends, her life, and Mister Cat will spend six months in quarantine. But her new stepbrothers, Tony and show more Julian, aren't too bad. Also, at least she'll be living in London, and she'll like London.

Except that Evan gets a new job, managing a farm in Dorset. And the house they'll be living in turns out to be barely habitable.

Jenny's a real pill through all this, and she knows it, and it's mostly intentional. She does eventually meet a girl at school, Meena Chari, whose efforts at friendship she cannot defeat, and eventually the six months are over and she gets Mister Cat back, and things get a little better.

The house is haunted, of course. There are lots of hints, but eventually Mister Cat brings Jenny proof, in the form of his new girlfriend, a ghost Persian. After a little more time, Jenny meets the Persian's person, Tamsin Willoughby, the daughter of Roger Willoughby, the founder of Stourhead Farm.

Tamsin has been dead for three hundred years, having died around the time of the Bloody Assizes, in 1685. She needs to move on, she should have moved on long ago, but there's something she needs to do first, and she can't remember what it is. It begins to seem that perhaps she doesn't really want to remember what it is. Jenny gradually realizes that, as much as she wants Tamsin to stick around, her continued presence is causing strange problems around Stourhead, and things need to be set right. Over the next couple of years, she meets a Pooka, the billy-blind, the Black Dog , the Old Lady of the Elder Tree, and assorted other unusual beings--along with just about the most terrifying ghost I've encountered. Oh, and the Wild Hunt, too.

It's a very good book, even if in some ways the most peculiar part of it is being that convincingly back inside my own adolescent head again. show less

Sometimes I forget about Peter Beagle, because I don't actually read that much fantasy. He wrote, of course, the fantasy classic "The Last Unicorn," which is a completely lovely book. But Tamsin is genius. It's written from the point of view of a 13 year old girl from New York, Jenny, who has to move to Dorset when her mother remarries. The old farmhouse turns out to be haunted by the gentle ghost of young Tamsin, who died during the Monmouth Rebellion. (Captain Blood readers take note: wicked Judge Jeffries is a major character)

This is a beautiful book. I believe if I went to Dorset, I would recognize this farm...and if I met Jenny, I would know her too. How a sixty (or is it seventy?) year old man can manage to make you believe he is show more really a thirteen year old girl is a mystery to me, but Beagle does it, in spades. And the relationship between Tamsin and Jenny is so touching that every time I read this book, I cry.

Here's a little footnote: I bought this book to stick in my daughter Anna's stocking one Christmas, but thought I ought to read a chapter first, to make sure it was readable. Four hours later I finished the book and headed back to the bookstore to buy three more copies - one for each of the daughters. I kept the first one. show less

So this is what happened with Tamsin: One year my mum espied this book, Tamsin, by the same dude who wrote The Last Unicorn, and because my family’s gift life is very hardcore about giving each other books that we think are going to be good, she bought it for my sister Anna, the biggest Last Unicorn fan of the four of us, for her Christmas stocking. With excellent intentions, she (my mum) started to read a bit of it to check it was good enough to be a stocking stuffer. Then she couldn’t stop reading it, and she read the whole thing. Then she bought Anna a fresh unread copy. Then she bought copies for everyone else in the family.

That’s how good a book it is.

The other day I was getting ready to go to the rec center, and I had picked show more out two books to read while I was working out, and they were two wondrous and captivating books: The Color Purple – which I might add I haven’t read for two years (good heavens, I cannot believe it has been that long) and was thus absolutely aching to read – and The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, which I had forgotten about until recently. These two books were on the kitchen counter ready to go, but then I remembered I wanted to glance at the topics for my Victorian lit paper, and I had to download them and my computer was running slow and what with one thing and another I grabbed Tamsin to read while I was waiting for that to work. I wasn’t even reading for two minutes, literally, but when I went to put Tamsin down and go exercise, my hand wouldn’t let go of it. Even though, even though, I had these two completely brilliant books waiting for me on the kitchen counter.

That’s how good a book it is. show less