(Original review date: 1 August 2007)I don't know how to describe this book, other than that it made me remember why I fell in love with reading in the first place. It's amazing. It's beautiful. I wished it would never end. I haven't felt this way about a book in so long I can't remember.I wasn't expecting to like it all that much. Sure, it's by Beagle, and you can always count on him for dazzling mythic fantasy and gorgeous prose. But the jacket didn't make it seem like anything special: A teen...

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 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

The plot was interesting but the characters! Oh my lord, the characters. I realize how long this is, so here is my summary: I hated EVERYONE except Meena, Julian, and Mister Cat. And I guess Tony but he was superfluous. Also, when did teens start calling smoking pot "getting lifted"?I will now elaborate on the top three annoying characters in descending order, starting with Jenny, the narrator. Jenny is truly funny and, at times, exactly like I was when I was a teen. She is grossed out that her

This deserves 4 stars based on the superb writing quality alone. The 8-point font really strained my eyes the whole I was reading this.It's about 13-year-old Jenny who moves from New York City to Dorset when her mother remarries. She runs into ghosts and other supernatural beings, but it's never scary. The ghost of Tamsin befriends Jenny, who is intensely curious about Tamsin's life and death. Tamsin isn't introduced in the story until about a third of the way through, so it's a lot more than a

"My Jenny, I will never see your own land, yet well I know night's as dark there as in Dorset. And night is not ours, and never will be, not till all is night. I tell you it will not, Jenny -- never any more than the sea, for all we plow and harrow up that darkness. What yet swims in the deepest deep, I'm sure none can say -- and not even the Pooka knows all that may move beyond the light. But you have friends there now -- do but remember that, and you'll come to no harm. You have friends in the...

I love, love, love this book. It's a ghost story about Jenny, an American teenager who is transplanted to an old manor in Dorset, England, when her mother remarries. The first-person point-of-view is an interesting switch for Beagle, who writes mostly in the third person, but it's very successful and just as beautifully written as his other books; he gets Jenny's voice just right without losing his usual lyricism. Along with ghosts, there are a myriad of other folklorish creatures, including an

After hearing so many allusions to this book on livejournal's book communities, I decided to give this book a try and I wasn't disappointed. I expected to be annoyed at Jenny, but her voice drew me in and wouldn't let go. She goes through all the confusion and sulking a teenager pulled away from home goes through, but she acknowledges in her narrative that her behavior embarrassed her. Her semi-denial of her respect for Evan was realistic, as expected of teenagers, as is her gradual respect and

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 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 ground...

4 1/2 stars really, loved it and definitely am trying to keep to the idea of reading books by the authors that i love, no new things for a while cause lately i've been reading some not so good books. super happy with this read and can't wait to read the innkeeper's song!!

Did not finish. I got about half way through it then skimmed to find out the ending. The narrator doesn't sound at all like a nineteen year old reminiscing about something that happened when she was thirteen; she sounds about ten or eleven years old throughout. With the exceptions of Mr Cat and Julian, the characterizations are one dimensional. When I think of Meg Murry, Anne Shirley, Jo March, and Blossom Culp, in comparison Jenny just feels flat, repetitive, uninteresting and uninterested in t...

Hm. I wonder if this book influenced Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven at all. For at least the first hundred pages, the writing is so full of "teen posturing language" (forgive me, teens--I couldn't think of a better way to say it), that it's nearly unbearable. No, I take that back. It is unbearable. I skimmed and skipped, hoping that the book would actually become readable. After all, I had read Peter Beagle before and I didn't remember him being so awful. When the title character finally enters th...

This was a quirky, totally unexpected story, which starts off in a very mundane way and develops into a strange, fantastical, supernatural adventure. Bringing it down to basics, it's a coming-of-age tale revolving around a young girl's struggles to come to terms with difficult, life-changing events at a particularly vulnerable period in her life. The writing style seems to be a slightly unsettled mixture of diary/letter/memoir but it worked reasonably well and was often very amusing; any book th...

Yes, another re-read. Maybe because I want to ease in 2016 gently, starting with familiar and reliable loved stories. God knows this year could be horrendously scary and full of unfamiliar stuffs. Tamsin still holds the fort. Still made me tears up a couple of time. I'd give away copies of it to everyone I know if I could. --------------Bumping in to 5 stars, because a book that can be read over and over again without loosing its glory is a special one indeed. the last read even gave me a creep

The story is beautifully written and told from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl who moves with her parents from Manhattan to a sprawling farm house in England. The house is haunted and inhabited by a ghost named Tamsin, who died more than 300 years ago. Jenny learns a lot about Tamsin and about the period of time she lived in. The story contains interesting historical snippets about the Bloody Assizes of 1685, the brutal and merciless Chief Justice Jeffries of Wem, the Monmouth Rebellion ag...

I can understand how Peter S. Beagle and Jack Cady became friends. Along with their vision of a world where the boundaries between Here and Now and There and Then are not absolute, they both write with an unfathomable depth of understanding of and respect for their characters and for those characters' stories, and also empathy without excuses, even a tenderness, a graciousness that allows the truth of the stories and characters to stand on their own and shine in their own light — and embrace the...

My sister read this and I thought that I would also like it since it was about ghosts but I couldn't even get through more than half. I hope to give this another try and maybe change my review.

With a contemporary setting and a ghost story as the foundation of the story, this is closer to A Fine and Private Place rather than The Last Unicorn or The Inkeeper's Song. Being told in the first person by a thirteen years old girl (Jennnifer - it comes from Guinevere, but she prefers Jenny) , the success of the book will rely heavily on your initial reaction to the storyteller. I was conquered and enchanted from the very first pages. I still remember what it meansto be 13, shy but bloody mind...

I first knew Peter S. Beagle as the writer of an excellent little introduction to The Lord of the Rings called 'Tolkien's Magic Ring.' He is probably to blame for my habit of actually reading forewords and prologues: occasionally, one finds a gem.Despite the cult success of The Last Unicorn, Beagle remains an under-recognized writer. Yet in each of his books so far I've found an original story, well-told. Reading him doesn't give the feeling that he's strung together the echoes of other stories

A truly wonderful young adult fantasy book. Reminds me of being a teenager and reminds me of some of the classic fantasies I read as a teenager.My words aren't adequate today, read Amanda Kespohl or Lis Carey's reviews.