#this really makes me want to pick up the book immediately
Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin! it’s a gorgeous lovesong to everything literature promises and affords; the joy, the consolation, the instruction, the thrill of intellectual discovery. Reading it I want to turn to Shakespeare, Keats, Pope, and Johnson, to the classic sff and noir Janet loves; to drink down the same bounteous delight and pleasure they offer her.
Mostly, though, I love that this is a story about a college where the entire Classics department - students and faculty both - are strange and glamorous inhabitants of Faerie; where the department’s two most prominent professors are gay women; where their tools of seduction are words and knowledge; where what tempts Janet into the faeries’ orbit is the sound of Homer in the original Greek.
