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 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. ( )

After moving to rural England, teenaged Jenny Gluckstein has her hands full with new stepbrothers, old ghosts, and one constant cat.

Tamsin never reaches the delirious genius of Beagle's The Last Unicorn or The Innkeeper's Song, which is not to say it isn't a very fine book in its own right. Ghosts and mythical deus ex machina figure heavily in the plodding plot, but they're beside the point. The real appeal of the book is watching a rebellious NYC teenager come to love her stepfamily (intense Tony and miraculous, frog-voiced Julian) and her adopted Dorset home. And the best part is the story's sense of immediate composition. It's told as if the reader is standing over Jenny's shoulder as she writes long-hand, with all the revealing cross-outs, switchbacks, and revisions that proximity betrays. ( )

American girl in Dorset helps free ghostly lovers

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. ( )