Tamsin

Rating:
Summary: Peter Beagle does it again
Review: I'm not exaggerating when I say that Peter Beagle is one of the best writers in the world. If you read fantasy, you've certainly read his novel "The Last Unicorn," voted one of the five best fantasy novels of all time. It's always a treat when he gifts us with a new story, which isn't often. In "Tamsin," he tries out a new style, very unlike anything he's written before. It's a twist on the classic ghost story, written from the viewpoint of a headstrong, 14-year old Bronx-raised girl who's trying to come to terms with her mother's remarriage, and with their new home: a run-down, 300-year old manor in the English countryside. If that wasn't bad enough, it turns out that the huge old house and farm that her family's trying to renovate are positively bustling with supernatural activity. Cold drafts, distant voices, boggarts in the kitchen, and things that go bump in the night. This supernatural world takes on an entirely new aspect for Jenny, however, when she discovers Tamsin, the ghost of a 19-year old girl who lived and "stopped," as she puts it, 300 years ago in the manor when it was first built. Tamsin is beautiful, mysterious and compelling, but as their friendship grows, Jenny is drawn deeper and deeper into the strange world of the "old country," and into deadly peril.

This is a great book for young and old alike. It's very compelling; you won't be able to put it down until the very end. Like most of Peter's books, the story runs the whole emotional range, from funny to sad to terrifying to joyous. And throughout, there's always the mystery and secret of Tamsin, unfolding piece by piece in Peter's Beagle's truly exhilarating, masterful, fairy-tale like style.

Rating:
Summary: Eerily realistic
Review: Jenny delivers an account of her move to Dorset England after her mother's remarriage to a farming soil expert, which results in her acquaintence of many supernatural creatures such as bogarts, pookas and a billy. She slowly becomes friends with the ghost of their residence, a 300 year old apparition named Tamsin, who can't remember what she has to do to be freed from this earth. Jenny picks up her story in bits and pieces, revealling that the ghostly Wild Hunt passes over frequently.

Although the start is slow, the writing is tantalizing -- Jenny, now 19, is writing down the events and talking to herself and the reader as she goes along, and as she tries to set the stage and not get ahead of herself, the reader is hooked, trying to figure out exactly what is going on. This lends a disturbingly realistic feel to the plot, and makes the reader believe that those long ago myths are entirely possible today.

Rating:
Summary: BELIEVABLE BEYOND COMPARE . . .
Review: Peter Beagle's most recent book creates characters that are so well-rounded and defined that you can't NOT believe in them. Jenny is, of course, the exact portrait of a thirteen-year-old, but not only that, everyone that surrounds her is fully fleshed out with a thousand details about their personality. It would be far too easy to turn them into stereotypes of 'the little brother', 'the best friend', 'the long-lost lover', but instead, they're completely real, with good points and bad points . . . the story itself could have so easily become just exactly like a million other stories of its type, but Peter Beagle handles it with such expertise and originality that you can't even consider comparing the book to anything else.

Rating:
Summary: TAMSIN continues to receive rave reviews.
Review: Peter Beagle's stunning return to novel-length fantasy continues to delight readers and critics. Publishers Weekly says of TAMSIN, "features characters so real they leap off his pages and into readers' souls...Slipping effortlessly between Jenny's brash 1999 lingo, the raw primeval dialect of ancient Dorset and Tamsin's exquisite Jacobean English, Beagle has created a stunning tale of good battling evil, of wonder and heartbreak and of a love able to outlast the worst vileness of the human heart. Fantasy rarely dances through the imagination in more radiant garb than this." (starred review)

Rating:
Summary: Tamsin, A Stellar YA
Review: Peter S. Beagle is in fine form again and has produced a wonderful Young Adult novel, quite suitable for us older adults who still dream and respect elder thickets. Tamsin belongs on the shelf next to Susan Cooper and Madeleine L'Engle, perhaps a little closer to the adult section because of the tolerance needed for his protagonist's initial 13-year old self-centered whine. She matures as the story unfolds, her growing emotional maturity driving events as the events force her maturity. Beagle has thought this out well; by the end, Jenny Gluckstein has become morally worthy of riding the Pooka after the Wild Hunt and getting help from a Great Old One to save a friend and bring closure to a 300 year old atrocity. She's a refreshingly tough kid with a good heart, neither bland nor shrinking. Her stubborn courage involves her, not her mere presence in a place of magic; she is consequently an admirable participant and actor instead of a passive observer. Five stars should be five cheers!

Rating:
Summary: What a Mixture!
Review: Peter S. Beagle's novel is a great mixture of teenage angst and fantasy. I enjoyed Jenny Gluckstein's transformation from "a sullen little hemorrhoid with feet" into an introspective, caring person. His description of the ghosts and other fantastic creatures, especially the pooka, made for fascinating reading. I found myself wondering where I could find out more about the Old Lady of the Elder Tree and the Wild Hunt.
I was able to lose myself in this novel, and I was sorry when the it ended. On the last page, the pooka said, "Jenny Gluckstein mystery belongs to mystery, not to Dorset or London. You are yourself as much a riddle as any you will ever encounter, and so you you will always draw riddles to you, wherever you may be. If there should be a boggart in New York, he will find your house, I assure you, as any pooka in London will know your name." This leaves a door open to perhaps meet Jenny again. I for one would be glad to meet Jenny and any of her fantastic compatriots in another novel.

Rating:
Summary: Beagle Just Keeps Getting Better
Review: The very first fantasy book I ever read was "The Last Unicorn". I still have fond memories of that book, but compared to Beagle's writing style of today it was crude. Over the years he has refined his skills. "Tamsin" is wonderful. That he can write a story from the perspective of a young girl, in a completely believable fashion, shows in itself how skillful he is. The young heroine is a unique person, but full of many of the same insecurities that most of us have experienced during our teens.

The story grows slowly, drawing the reader in, allowing the absurd to seem perfectly reasonable. A truly memorable tale. This is worth getting in hardcover.

Rating:
Summary: Beagle Just Keeps Getting Better
Review: The very first fantasy book I ever read was "The Last Unicorn". I still have fond memories of that book, but compared to Beagle's writing style of today it was crude. Over the years he has refined his skills. "Tamsin" is wonderful. That he can write a story from the perspective of a young girl, in a completely believable fashion, shows in itself how skillful he is. The young heroine is a unique person, but full of many of the same insecurities that most of us have experienced during our teens.

The story grows slowly, drawing the reader in, allowing the absurd to seem perfectly reasonable. A truly memorable tale. This is worth getting in hardcover.

Rating:
Summary: GOoD STORY ABOUT GHOSTS
Review: this book was great. it tells the story of a 13 year old girl who moves to doreset. she dosent want to go but ends up have the adventure of a lifetime when see meets a ghost named tamsin.

Rating:
Summary: Makes you believe...
Review: This is a highly enjoyable ghost story. Ninteen year old New Yorker Jenny is looking back on the events that took place after she and her mother move to a run-down farm in Dorset, England to live with her stepfather and stepbrothers. Along with the story of Jenny coming to terms with her new stepfamily and settling in to a new school where she feels like an outsider, we also have the story of Tamsin.

Tamsin is the daughter of the original owner of the farm, from the fifteenth century. For some reason, Tamsin does not leave the farmhouse after her tragic early death, but hangs around in ghost form, along with her ghost cat. When Jenny sees and speaks to Tamsin, this seems to stir up all of the characters of myth and legend that abound in Dorset--Pookahs, Billy Blinds, and the Black Dog, who appears as an omen of something terrible to come.

Yet as we find out more about Tamsin's past, and Jenny is drawn deeper and deeper into the place where past and present meet, we realize that not all of these characters are merely mischevious--some are downright evil.

This book builds to a whirlwind climax that will have you on the edge of your set. It manages to be a thrilling ghost story while also a satisfying story of family life and "coming-of-age".

Very enjoyable.