Great characters, nonexistent plot.

This was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Love this one. Really love anything Pamela Dean does.

Dean has a fantastic knack for describing place, and she creates one of the most amusing family houses I've ever read in Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary. I wish I lived in that house, with its wall to wall books and endless room for any pursuit one might care to take on, including astronomy.

The place is so strong, and the group of sisters (plus their educated parents) who live there so vivid that it puts a screeching halt on story development. By the time we figure out what the mysterious boy who lives next door has been up to (for the last two hundred-some pages), it is a bit of a letdown, because any build-up of daily life requires a tremendous payoff, and the conclusion here is blurred at best. It's hard, even, to really say what happens to our heroine, Gentian, in her showdown with Damien, because it all ends so quickly, and is wiped from our minds like a white-out transition during a movie screening.

Regardless of that, however, I would recommend this book because the characters are entertaining, and so engrossing, one rarely has to worry about the plot until its discolored climax appears.

Lovely, as always, though I stumbled a bit over what may be Dean's characteristic backloading of plot. Everything seems to happen in the last fifty pages, and I'm still not sure WHAT the central point of the book was. An allegory for growing up seems likely, but with the whole book bogged down by quotations, who really knows?

DNF

I can't criticize this work. I know it's brilliant according to those who have. But I am not the kind of person who can plow through. I am (honestly) happy for those who have, for I sense a level of brilliance I can't find.

I have read a lot (like, a metric gollyton) of books where the author tried to blend the realistic and the magical seamlessly together. Pamela Dean goes a good deal farther: she blends the realistic and lifelike with the mythic.
Gentian and her sisters Juniper and Rosemary are leading busy lives, the lives of intelligent children of intelligent parents, pursuing their various interests (cooking, poetry, Scouting, astronomy). It's a very attractive slice of life in a family you would love to have living next door, or to have been born into. Dean could have simply described a busy year in this family's life and had a first-rate modern version of an E. Nesbit book. Instead, she reached a bit deeper, and when I say deeper, I mean she pulled aside the curtain to show forces at work beyond our knowledge -- but not entirely beyond our control.
Gentian is young, but she knows that young romance is a flirtation with dangerous forces, and that it puts her in danger of getting her heart broken. She knows that having Dominic in her life might cost her. She just has no idea, in Dominic's case, what those powers are, or how dangerous they are, or what it might cost her.
Gentian does survive, at a cost. She just doesn't know what that cost will turn out to be, either.
I would recommend this book to any reader, but especially to intelligent 13-year-old girls, or their parents.

the end did not fit with the rest of the book.

I found the meandering pace, the world of people who speak in poetry, and the abrupt and not-quite-satisfying resolution of Tam Lin charming; in the Secret Country series it worked pretty well, too. By this book I'm tired of it.

Not that it wasn't enjoyable anyway, because even a book that screams on every page that it was written by Pamela Dean was, well, written by Pamela Dean, and sometimes (now seems to be one of those times) a meandering pace will pull me along as easily as nonstop action. I understand this one, too, is based on a ballad, but one I'm not familiar with; I will have to look it up.

I'm rather conflicted about this book. It's very like Tan Lin and has a simlar pacing. In some ways it is lovely -- full of the friendships of smart girls. There are a lot of literary references which are delightful when one gets them but puzzling when one doesn't and while I got some I also missed many. And the ending was both confusing and really distressing.

Loses points for density and a distinct nonending, but I enjoyed it much better than any of Dean's other books.

Meh. Tam Lin is a favorite of mine, and I’ve re-read it several times. I feel Pamela Dean wrote better dialogue for college students than pre-teens.

The dialogue in particular seemed odd; much of the book and many characters felt one sided as if they could have been lifted from Gentian’s diary, though I suppose that’s a good metaphor for adolescence as well.

The ending. Well, I give it points for sitting with the consequences, unsatisfying as they are. I enjoy unconventional endings. But what a weird, untidy one.