Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

Paper Book, 1999

Description

From the bestselling author of The Last Unicorn comes an "engaging story of a friendship that transcends time"(Library Journal)... Arriving in the magnificent countryside of Dorset, England, to live with her mother and new stepfather, the young and very American Jenny Gluckstein has little interest in her historic surroundings, including that of the 700 acre Stourhead Farm her stepfather is restoring. Then she meets Tamsin, a kindred spirit that has haunted the lonely estate for 300 years, trapped by a hidden trauma she can't remember, and by a powerful evil even the spirits of night cannot name. To help her, Jenny must delve deeper into the dark world than any human has in centuries, and face a danger that will change her life forever.… (more)

Status

Available

Call number

813/.54

Publication

New York : ROC, c1999.

User reviews

LibraryThing member kmaziarz
Thoroughly American New Yorker Jenny Gluckstein is a typical teenager: she hates her mother, except when she doesn’t; she hates her father, except that she loves him; she smokes pot with her friends; and she’s convinced she’s ugly. So when her musician mother Sally remarries, this time to a
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British agronomist, and the whole family—including two new step-brothers for Jenny—is relocated to a rundown old estate farm in Dorset, England, Jenny is anything but happy about it—especially not when she realizes her beloved cat, Mister Cat, will be quarantined for six months. But once Mister Cat is returned to her, the adventure of Jenny’s life begins. Mister Cat takes off running one night, chasing another animal. It turns out to be the 300-year-old ghost of another cat who has stayed around to keep her own mistress company: the ghost of Tamsin Willoughby, who once lived on the farm. Unhappy and uneasy, her spirit has never left the farm, though she only remembers her past in bits and flashes. The two girls, one living and one dead, soon become fast friends, and ghostly Tamsin introduces Jenny to the other supernatural beasties inhabiting the farm, including a mischievous boggart, the silent Black Dog, and the unpredictable Pooka. But when Judge Jeffries—another restless spirit from the past, this one not nearly so benign as Tamsin—begins manifesting, Jenny has to grow up fast and save her friend from utter destruction.

Enchanting and masterful, dealing equally gracefully with the violent history of the Dorset region and the concerns and complaints of contemporary teenagers, Tamsin is that rare book equally suited to teen readers and adults. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member 2chances
Sometimes I forget about Peter Beagle, because I don't actually read that much fantasy. He wrote, of course, the fantasy classic "The Last Unicorn," which is a completely lovely book. But Tamsin is genius. It's written from the point of view of a 13 year old girl from New York, Jenny, who has to
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move to Dorset when her mother remarries. The old farmhouse turns out to be haunted by the gentle ghost of young Tamsin, who died during the Monmouth Rebellion. (Captain Blood readers take note: wicked Judge Jeffries is a major character)

This is a beautiful book. I believe if I went to Dorset, I would recognize this farm...and if I met Jenny, I would know her too. How a sixty (or is it seventy?) year old man can manage to make you believe he is really a thirteen year old girl is a mystery to me, but Beagle does it, in spades. And the relationship between Tamsin and Jenny is so touching that every time I read this book, I cry.

Here's a little footnote: I bought this book to stick in my daughter Anna's stocking one Christmas, but thought I ought to read a chapter first, to make sure it was readable. Four hours later I finished the book and headed back to the bookstore to buy three more copies - one for each of the daughters. I kept the first one.
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LibraryThing member Narilka
With Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle tells a tale full of English myths from the perspective of 13-year-old Jenny Gluckstien. Jenny's life is turned upside down when her mother remarries and moves their small family from New York City to a farm in the English countryside. Suddenly finding herself with a
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new stepdad and two step brothers in a whole new country, Jenny reacts about as poorly as you can imagine, making herself quite a pain for everyone around her. Naturally, the manor and surrounding grounds is haunted by all sorts of creatures, including the ghost of a young girl who has been trapped on the estate since she died roughly 300 years ago. Jenny gradually finds herself pulled into the mystery of surrounding Stourhead Farm and the creatures of the night that live there.

I think this is one of those stories people will either love or hate. I'm firmly in the "loved it" camp. The tale moves at a slow and deliberate pace as we're introduced to Jenny and her life in New York. Jenny is quite the character! I remember what it was like being an teenage girl with plenty of angst and I'm impressed with how well Beagle was able to capture that feeling without making me hate her. Deliberately making yourself difficult as a passive aggressive way to deal with life? Yeah, I remember that to. This story is firmly YA in that regard so if you don't enjoy reading teenage angst, you should probably avoid this book.

The farm is quite haunted. I loved how Beagle pulled out so many local myths to inhabit Stourhead. Even though it was published in 1999, the book reads like "timeless" children's literature. Jenny and the haunts on the farm feel like they could have come out of virtually any time period prior to the internet age.

The story was absolutely delightful. Beagle writes such beautiful and atmospheric prose that I found myself completely whisked away into the night world of Stourhead Farm. I truly enjoyed my time getting to know Jenny, Tamsin, Mister Cat and all the creatures she encounters as Jenny unravels what is keeping Tamsin from moving on. I was sad when the story ended as I really wasn't ready to leave Stourhead.
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LibraryThing member threadnsong
An excellent retelling of the Wild Hunt and Dorset, and the intertwining of lives and loves and a ghost who must find her way back to her lost love.

It begins with thirteen-year-old Jenny Gluckstein whose mother has found an Englishman to follow back to Dorset where he is tasked with bringing life
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back to an old, worn-out farm. Jenny's closest friends bid her goodbye and Mr. Cat has to spend six months in quarantine in England, and even though she is fighting to not let all "this" happen, she is still able to set up the paperwork for a good location for Mr. Cat. Her inventiveness and stubbornness are just the qualities she needs for her new life.

As Jenny becomes, not acclimated, but used to her new home and new family, she also finds that the land and house has a previous inhabitant named Tamsin Willoughby who cannot leave this earth yet. Even though she died three hundred years ago during the Bloody Assizes, she is stuck to this earth with her own cat, Miss Sophia Brown, and she introduces Jenny to Willoughby Farm and its denizens, including a Pooka and the Black Dog, and provides a warning about the Oak Wood.

Peter Beagle is able to weave legend and story in such an accessible manner. And the thoughts of a thirteen-year-old girl (as I once was) all come together to create a non-scary ghost story and the fate of country folk and the unique brevity of life for us all.
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LibraryThing member herbpixie
I love Peter S. Beagle, but this particular book fell a little flat for me. Lovely kids book, but not nearly as well-written as The Innkeeper's Song.
LibraryThing member phoebesmum
Beagle suffers badly from his first two fiction books – 'A Fine and Private Place' (written in the ‘50s) and 'The Last Unicorn' (written in the ‘60s) having been his best. This was ... nice. Just that, really. Nothing spectacular. Well-drawn characters, a realistic narrative voice, but
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nothing hugely memorable. Also, I very much doubt that the owners of the farm in the story would have sunk all that money into making it viable. They’d’ve sold the land off for housing estates.
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LibraryThing member Sean191
Peter Beagle is an amazing storyteller. His stories just have a timeless quality to them and a comfort to them that I haven't encountered much before. Even though his books singly might not be my absolute favorite, his body of work has to have him up at the top for my favorite authors at this
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point...I'm going to be reading everything I can get my hands on to see if the magic maintains.

For Tamsin, he offers a narrator who might have come off as unlikeable in the hands of a less-talented author. Instead, even though she is stubborn and self-centered at times, Beagle's masterful treatment shows her evolution to someone the reader can feel good cheering on. The story itself has so many nods and winks to traditional English faeries and goblins that it's just fun to read as well.
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LibraryThing member The_Hibernator
This is the first Peter S. Beagle book I’ve read, and I thought it was pretty darn good. It’s a young adult fantasy about a young teenaged girl who moves to Dorset with her mother and new stepfather, and learns how to deal with the magical creatures and ghosts that roam the historical area.
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This teaches her a lesson about who she is and what she wants to be. It was cute and magical. It’s most appropriate audience would be teenaged girls (because of the heroine), but I think boys would enjoy it as well.
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LibraryThing member RussianLoveMachine
Anyone who enjoys a good ghost story will like this book about a thirteen year old girl and her cat who meet a 300 year old ghost named Tamsin. Comparable to the Redwall series.
LibraryThing member dbsovereign
Cats, ghosts and other creepy things. A very different book from _The Last Unicorn_, but this first-person narrative sparkles with unique characters. Fantasy, but fantasy grounded in a very real setting. Bitter and sweet - in any one else's hands it would be sappy.
LibraryThing member simchaboston
Count me among the readers who found this fantastic. I really liked that Beagle took a different route from many writers by *not* plunging right away into the more supernatural elements of the plot. What is initially lost in pacing is more than made up for by the wonderfully evocative atmosphere
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and the fully-fleshed out and appealing characters; since I love history, the historical fictional parts are a bonus. The lead, Jenny, is drawn particularly well (honestly and hilariously analyzing her 13-year-old self); too bad there aren't any sequels, as I'd love to spend more time in her world.
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LibraryThing member AltheaAnn
A nice YA ghost story.

I have to admit, however, that this book didn't quite live up to my expectations (set high, recently, by 'The Inkeeper's Song' and a couple of Beagle's short stories.

A rebellious teenager, Jenny, is reluctantly transplanted from NYC to the English countryside. She's got a new
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stepfamily to deal with, and a deal of culture shock - but she's quickly distracted by the fact that the crumbling old manor house she's stuck in is haunted. The ghost is Tamsin, a young woman who died 300 years ago. Jenny is impelled to research Tamsin's tragic history, and to help her tormented spirit find peace.

To me (writing from NYC), I found that the evocation of British country life and folklore was vivid and effective. However, the beginning of the book - the portrayal of Jenny's life here in New York - I found completely unconvincing. I actually had to look up Beagle's stats - he's really American, not British, which is just weird, because I didn't feel like he captured what it's like to live in New York AT ALL. It's hard to put my finger on why, but one example is, upon arrival in London, Jenny's mom points out people wearing saris to her daughter like it's something new and unusual. Umm, it would be very hard to grow up in NYC and never have seen people wearing Indian traditional dress. But that's really just the first few pages.
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LibraryThing member LisCarey
I remember being an adolescent girl. That seems normal enough, because I was one for several years. It's a bit scarier that Peter Beagle seems to remember being an adolescent girl.

Jenny Gluckstein is thirteen years old, and living with her divorced mother, a music teacher in New York, and visiting
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regularly with her father, an opera singer. She's a bit of a misfit at school, which most adolescents are, but she has two friends she spends a lot of time with, and she has a cat, Mister Cat.

And then her mother announces she's marrying her boyfriend, Evan McHugh, and that she and Jenny are moving to England with him. She'll be leaving her friends, her life, and Mister Cat will spend six months in quarantine. But her new stepbrothers, Tony and Julian, aren't too bad. Also, at least she'll be living in London, and she'll like London.

Except that Evan gets a new job, managing a farm in Dorset. And the house they'll be living in turns out to be barely habitable.

Jenny's a real pill through all this, and she knows it, and it's mostly intentional. She does eventually meet a girl at school, Meena Chari, whose efforts at friendship she cannot defeat, and eventually the six months are over and she gets Mister Cat back, and things get a little better.

The house is haunted, of course. There are lots of hints, but eventually Mister Cat brings Jenny proof, in the form of his new girlfriend, a ghost Persian. After a little more time, Jenny meets the Persian's person, Tamsin Willoughby, the daughter of Roger Willoughby, the founder of Stourhead Farm.

Tamsin has been dead for three hundred years, having died around the time of the Bloody Assizes, in 1685. She needs to move on, she should have moved on long ago, but there's something she needs to do first, and she can't remember what it is. It begins to seem that perhaps she doesn't really want to remember what it is. Jenny gradually realizes that, as much as she wants Tamsin to stick around, her continued presence is causing strange problems around Stourhead, and things need to be set right. Over the next couple of years, she meets a Pooka, the billy-blind, the Black Dog , the Old Lady of the Elder Tree, and assorted other unusual beings--along with just about the most terrifying ghost I've encountered. Oh, and the Wild Hunt, too.

It's a very good book, even if in some ways the most peculiar part of it is being that convincingly back inside my own adolescent head again.
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LibraryThing member ltjennysbooks
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
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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.
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Awards

Mythopoeic Awards (Finalist — Adult Literature — 2000)
World Fantasy Award (Nominee — Novel — 2000)

Language

Original publication date

1999

ISBN

0451457633 / 9780451457639
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