My personal rating/reaction 2 stars, but I'll give it 3 for writing.

This was a hot mess of a book. For 300 and some pages the book meanders along, opining on everything from Shakespeare, feminism, intellectualism, friendship, romance and astronomy, to hit the high points. Nothing much happens plot-wise, save a mysterious family with a devastating handsome, quotation-spewing son named Dominic, moves in next door to the Meriweathers. Aside from bumping into him repeatedly and oddly, little happens. The three sisters named in the book's title find him by turns aggravating and fascinating but mostly continue their own lives interspersed with sisterly squabbles.

It's only as the book closes in around the 300 mark that anything actually happens, and that big event is that Dominic finally starts to build his science project in the sisters' attic, a time machine. The whole book then wraps up by page 350. In addition to abruptly setting the plot in motion, only to slam to a halt in a mere 50 pages, the ending makes no goddamn sense and Dean suddenly decides to introduce magic into the story at that late date. What a cop out and a cheat.

Frankly the whole book was a tiresome exercise in intellectual pretentiousness, disguised as a fantasy novel. I enjoy some good quotations and literary references in my books as much as the next person. I would say I'm fairly well and widely read and that Dean's incessant quoting and exegesis on not one, not two but three Shakespeare plays had me wanting to gouge my eyes out. If you thought slogging through the bard in school was an exercise in misery, it's nothing compared to having the author have the characters actually read the play out loud to each other, reciting the actual lines while making commentary on the side.

So if I hated this book so much, you might ask yourself, why did I finish it? Well, Dean is actually a very decent writer, prose wise. She did an excellent job capturing the uneasy dynamics in the sibling relationship, and I thought she also painted a very realistic picture of Gentian's friends (aside from their highly unrealistic conversations about philosophy and poetry). I also was once very interested in astronomy so Gentian's hobby resonated with me. Aside from that, as a Minneapolis native I really enjoyed reading about my hometown. I had forgotten about the planetarium that had been part of the old central library, she name checked my old high school and as one might expect, she got the weather and seasons of Minnesota just right. Still, nostalgia can only take you so far. Lastly it drove me nuts that Gentian's cat was called Maria Mitchell, but then for no reason she's also referred to as Murr. Fine, but pick one for heaven's sake and stick to it. She would often use both names in the same sentence. We get it - Maria Mitchell was a famous, female astronomer, I don't need to be hot over the head with it every. Single. Chapter.

So yeah, not a fan of this book. It's a shame that the plot couldn't live up to the writing.

I have been rereading this book for years on end -- I think the last time was in 2012 -- and I still have not figured out how to write about it clearly. From one point of view it has so many things wrong with it in terms of pacing and plot, and from another point of view it is one of those books that holds together in a symbolic/thematic way and all the plot bits are just what positions the symbols so that the reader can see the constellation. I think it is ambitious, and not really successful, but I do keep rereading it and wondering how on earth it could be different and still have all of the things I love about it, all the things that make me see what the ambition was pointing toward.

I get it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I honestly don't know what I just read. I was confused half the time, although full time by the ending chapters....

This book is much more than a story of a 14-year-old astronomer-to be who accepts to host in her attic a mysterious boy who speaks in quoted and riddles and wants to build a time machine in 1993.

This books is full of astronomy wordly paraphernalia, quotes and riddles from literature, the human experience of having two sisters, and weird fun friend group, magic and the devil?!?!?!
Make that make sense, because I couldn't.....

I enjoyed it, but I'm positively confused. I didn't get any message?

Was it," no one will save you, and that's why you have to save yourself "

I'm not sure....

Anyway, I'm happy I finished it ... I have to many books I have started but not finished, but I'm working on that now ... Having too many books half-read may have or may not have send my mind into emotional stagnation.

Anyways my favourite quotes:

"But Junie got away with saying many awful things because she had red hair and people liked to joked about her temper" - Chpt. 1

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" - Chpt. 11

"He feared that many that smiled had in their hearts millions of mischiefs" - Chpt. 16

"The revelation of multiplicity in unity interested her deeply" - Chpt. 17

" 'I told you he was a gentleman,' said their father
'If you mean he abides by a strict set of arbitrary rules of no use to him or anybody else, you're right,' said their mother." - Chpt. 20

Some years ago I saw a copy of this book in a bookstore, looked at it, and thought, "Nah, it doesn't look interesting" or "Maybe later" or something like that. And later never really happened and the book quietly withered away, at least as the likelihood of finding it in bookstores is concerned.

But now, having a more intense appreciation of Pamela Dean, I decided to snag this book from the library. I will admit to peeking at some reviews on Goodreads beforehand. At least one of them said the teenagers are unrealistic, and I have to agree that they kind of are (particularly the viewpoint character) when it comes to their dialogue. The references to Them! (old movie about giant ants) made me smile, though. Also, it feels like there was a lot of stuff and it took forever to get to the meat of the plot (which, yes, I know is what a lot of people say about Tam Lin).

Also I'm not sure the plot is ultimately that ... plotty? If there really is much meat to it? Like Tam Lin, this is based on one of the ballads that Francis James Child recorded. But I don't think it holds up as well. And I think that the children from the The Secret Country trilogy carry off the "surprisingly literate children" thing much better than do the ones here.

Flipping ahead, I did see one creepy part, spoken by her father: "I guess this is what comes of trying to protect you from ordinary garden-variety sexuality. I suppose we upset the ecological balance in some way. Only the top predator was left."

Amusingly, the heroine's parents went to Blackstock, the half-fictional college where Tam Lin took place. I might take another look at this later, to see if there are any other references to it. (But I suspect that was the only one.)

I liked this, and I probably would have liked it more when I was in the 12-14 age group.

I felt there were some things that could have been further developed in the book and others that could have been cut. The setup was >200 pages, the climactic event maybe 20. And I didn't really understand what Dominic's goal was.

I'd like to know a lot more about Gentian's father and Mrs. Zimmerman and their magic. That was a throwaway right before the end of the book.

Small niggle: how did the Giant Ants get their name? Who came up with that?

And seriously -- a 14 year old disappears completely for 9 months and nobody asks where Gentian is? No alarm from the school, Social Services, her friends and their parents? I'd have thought that at least one social worker would show up and insist that they be allowed to see Gentian and verify her well-being.

I'd like to see Rosemary be the focus of another book. Especially considering her survival skills acquired courtesy of the Girl Scouts.

Too much going on for me here... and the sides of the story were much more interesting that what was, I think, the central conflict. The result is that I found the book pretty fun to read, but the ending extremely disappointing, as none of my questions were resolved. And I knew all along they wouldn't be; worse luck.

If you love Alcott's extended ouevre for the minutiae of her characters' everyday life (like me), you'll probably love this one too.

Pamela Dean, I realized, reminds me a lot Madeleine L'Engle . . . well, that needs some explanation. Her books make me feel like L'Engle's books do, it's hard to explain, they make me want to think about things and have interesting conversations about the universe and our place in it with friends and family in a kitchen while drinking cocoa, and they really make me talk like her characters, which is a little unfortunate. The Meriweathers, the main family in this book, remind me a lot of the Austens, precocious and opinionated children, wise and funny parents, and lots of connectedness--no feeling of impending family schism you find in a lot of young adult novels.

This story is based on an old ballad called "Riddles Wisely Expounded" but it really doesn't get around to that for a long time. Mostly it's about a girl named Gentian Meriweather who wants to be an astronomer, and all the stuff she looks at through her telescope, all the things she thinks about on the eve of adolescence, and the conversations she has with her close friends. It's mostly just a very comfortable novel, with a strange and surprising, but still good, ending to it.

Like Tam Lin this novel was very detailed and included an inordinate amount of quotations, but it made up for some things in Tam Lin, too. For one thing it takes a more reasonable view of modern poetry and anthropology instead of writing them off entirely. I don't know if that means the main characters are not merely spouting the views of the author, or if the views of the author changed between books. This book is also set in the same universe as Tam Lin, it seems, since Gentian's parents went to the same college that is the setting for Tam Lin, although that is a completely incidental detail. I liked that the author dropped it in there, though, it made me feel a happy connectedness.

This book is an endless conversation about books. And about religion and right or wrong and about friendship and family. Oh, and there's magic. Not much happens, but I love it dearly.

I don't know that I've ever encountered an author who I loved so completely and immediately while being unsure that I would recommend them to everyone I know. I read Tam Lin and Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary in quick succession and adored them both. They are lyrical in the truest sense, and Dean takes the time required to really sink into the lives of her characters until they feel truly genuine. Add to this that both sets of characters are people that I would love to spend more time with and it's not hard to understand that I could not put the books down.

Mild spoilers ahead, as the reason that I wouldn't recommend them to everyone is a factor that made me love them all the more.

In both books, there is clearly something odd at work in the background - and that's where it stays, for a quarter of the book and half the book and three-quarters until you're lulled into the idea that it's just the ordinary weirdness of the world. Then the unnatural jumps out and strikes you in the face as it pulls the characters in, and it's so sudden and so overwhelming that I could hardly keep my balance. It's lovely and unusual and I will be reading more.[/spoiler]

Brilliant mashup: coming-of-age plus fantasy plus (and this last is always a winner for me) a retelling of a folk song.

More precisely: it's a reluctant coming-of-age [14-year-olds who sense that they're in danger of losing what each of them values most about themself]; fantasy that sneaks into a solidly real 1990s world and gradually darkens until the climactic episode; and a retelling of a fairly obscure folk song that I don't even recall hearing before.

Here's the thing: I read about a third of the story and suddenly thought, "I'm missing some clues." So I started over, and actually I missed many of them again, and misinterpreted the ones I did catch. But going forward, I knew the characters better (there are 7 young girls and their shifting alliances to follow, plus families and friends). And themes and riddles and quotations began to echo and add up. So all of that saved me from feeling, as some readers do, that the fantasy stuff only kicks in suddenly towards the end.

And this might amuse those who've already read it:  reading it in summer 2023, with AI so much on our minds, I decided early on that the mysterious Boy Next Door--who spoke almost exclusively in quotations from classics--must be a robot. Silly me.

I don't actually think this is a book many young YA readers will enjoy. I think many of them might feel it slow, the 7 girls arch and bookish and their interests obscure and pretentious. I'd call it New Adult. Or Old Adult, like me.

I don't assign stars to living authors, except to those few books I plan to keep and reopen on rainy days--or in this case, starry nights.