I have a bone to pick with Dean's Tam Lin
Oct. 16th, 2016 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeActually, two bones. One small one with the author and a much larger one with the current publisher's marketing department.
The smaller bone first: I was a faculty child for my undergraduate years, and an English major (along with a block of Classics). Janet's relative lack of knowledge of the university (specifically, the faculty) where her father teaches Romantics (mine taught Hegel) keeps breaking my WSOD.
Of my five professors in first year, I was acquainted with three, not because I chose courses based in whether I knew who taught them (though I did choose sections in two courses by what I knew of them: of the two professors, one I had known for eight years, and one I knew of only by name) but just because one becomes familiar with one's father's SCR and departmental colleagues, not to mention the number of faculty members whose children had gone to high school with one. And all my teachers, all the dons, my head of college, knew who I was.
Janet, by comparison, knows the campus, but not the people. I have a very hard time seeing her as a faculty child.
As for the bigger bone: this book was originally published as an adult fantasy book as part of Tor's Fairy Tale series. It has been republished, and marketed, as a YA/teen book.
This is a book whose full enjoyment depends on things like knowing who Robert Armin was, or what the actual sound of Shakespeare's English was like. It helps if one knows Le Roman de la Rose, The Lady's Not For Burning, Tourneur, Summer's Last Will and Testament, classical tragedy, and Stoppard, or at least about them. These are not things which any plausible typical teen is going to know. (I did, in fact, know these things by 19, by which time I was in second year university, but I'm pretty sure that's not the slot envisaged by "teen literature".) There is no reasonable sense in which this book can be considered as aimed at anything other than an adult audience, and a fairly well-educated adult audience at that.
Overall, though, it's a delightful book, and better (I think) than Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, although Jones has a better structure, starting in medias res. The disparity in ages in Jones' version works against the story, whereas the undergraduate atmosphere of Dean's story actively helps the flow of the story.
The smaller bone first: I was a faculty child for my undergraduate years, and an English major (along with a block of Classics). Janet's relative lack of knowledge of the university (specifically, the faculty) where her father teaches Romantics (mine taught Hegel) keeps breaking my WSOD.
Of my five professors in first year, I was acquainted with three, not because I chose courses based in whether I knew who taught them (though I did choose sections in two courses by what I knew of them: of the two professors, one I had known for eight years, and one I knew of only by name) but just because one becomes familiar with one's father's SCR and departmental colleagues, not to mention the number of faculty members whose children had gone to high school with one. And all my teachers, all the dons, my head of college, knew who I was.
Janet, by comparison, knows the campus, but not the people. I have a very hard time seeing her as a faculty child.
As for the bigger bone: this book was originally published as an adult fantasy book as part of Tor's Fairy Tale series. It has been republished, and marketed, as a YA/teen book.
This is a book whose full enjoyment depends on things like knowing who Robert Armin was, or what the actual sound of Shakespeare's English was like. It helps if one knows Le Roman de la Rose, The Lady's Not For Burning, Tourneur, Summer's Last Will and Testament, classical tragedy, and Stoppard, or at least about them. These are not things which any plausible typical teen is going to know. (I did, in fact, know these things by 19, by which time I was in second year university, but I'm pretty sure that's not the slot envisaged by "teen literature".) There is no reasonable sense in which this book can be considered as aimed at anything other than an adult audience, and a fairly well-educated adult audience at that.
Overall, though, it's a delightful book, and better (I think) than Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, although Jones has a better structure, starting in medias res. The disparity in ages in Jones' version works against the story, whereas the undergraduate atmosphere of Dean's story actively helps the flow of the story.
