The first time I heard “As It Was”, I was struck by the mention of foxgloves. “There is a roadway, muddy and foxgloved”: What is this roadway and why is it bordered with foxgloves in particular? The foxgloved road is the first clue we have to the background of the imagery in this haunting song.
2. Polly Whittacker is the biggest bookworm and overall wonderful protagonist
3. Granny is THE most wonderful back-up parent for a kid with two shitty actual parents
4. multiple female friendships! close ones!
a. Polly grows out of and into her friendships. Nina was a great childhood friend, but Polly had more in common with Fiona as an older teen then college student, and both friendships were important to her life and growth!
5. Thomas Lynn
6. The way Tom:
a. heroically drives his horse-car
b. plays the cello
c. understands Polly
d. also understands Granny’s perspective
7. Polly’s emotional range! How her soft-heartedness leads her to be overly nice to undeserving people like David Bragge and Seb, and yet she can also stand up for herself to Seb and Mr. Leroy and Mr. Piper.
8. the entire Bristol scene, which went from a raw and emotional low point where Polly feels “bleached” to the lovely relief of meeting the Dumas quartet
9. who doesn’t love a good Tam Lin retelling?
10. Diana Wynne Jones actually wrote an essay called “The Heroic Ideal” about why she wrote Fire and Hemlock
11. the logic Polly and Tom learn to follow to outsmart Laurel and the Leroys
12. Tan Coul and Hero, and their friends Tan Thare, Tan Hanivar, and Tan Audel
13. how Tom sent Polly books from all around the country
14. how those books nearly always included heavy-handed hints about his situation that she never quite connected
a. how she was annoyed that he never said he was in trouble, but realized HE HAD MADE SURE SHE KNEW
15. the NOWHERE vases
16. their Tales From Nowhere
17. Mintchoc
18. “being a hero means ignoring how silly you feel”
19. the devastating effects of embarrassment
20. letters
21. overall how beautiful and clever Diana Wynne Jones’s words are
[a commissioned digital painting created for @k_trattner on twitter based on their novel a modern retelling of Tam Lin a fairy ballad originating from the Scottish Borders]
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.
[image id: a stylised digital painting of Janet and Tamlin from Tamlin by Aven Wildsmith. Janet is a girl with warm brown skin and short dark wavy hair in a yellow dress. She stands on the left in side profile and is holding Tamlin’s head in her arms, looking down with a tender expression. Tamlin has warm brown skin and long dark hair, in a long sleeved red top and a green cloak. She is clutching at Janet and her face is obscured by Janet’s arm. They’re both lit by a light bursting out between their arms at their point of contact. They stand against a stylised purple oval-shaped background, framed by a light brown background. Above them, dark brown handwritten text reads “Janet took her cloak from her shoulders, wrapped it around her love,” and bottom text reading “and at this the spell was over.”. End image id.]
Fanart for Tamlin by @avenwildsmith - bought a copy recently and fell in love, 10/10 would recommend for one of the most enchanting myth retellings I’ve ever read
Tam Lin coming out from between the trees with his shirt open down to his stomach and the chiseled jaw of a greek god: do you not know the dangers of wandering this forest alone, fair maiden?
I wish three things came up more often when discussing Fire and Hemlock, and they are:
1. The uncomfortableness of the age difference is intentional, it’s a theme of the novel! DWJ knew it was uncomfortable, she did it on purpose, and we know this because we see terrible age-difference relationships deliberately echoed and mirrored throughout the story. It’s thematic!
The primary one is Laurel, of course. God, Laurel gets her suitors very young (Tom was orphaned and essentially adopted by Laurel at age 13, enslaved to her via the Obah Cypt by age 17, and presumably married not long after. And Laurel puts her eye on Leslie when he’s thirteen as well and then starts dating him when he’s 15.) But Seb is also an example, and not just because he pursues Polly even after she yells at him that she’s “too young!” but also because we learn he manipulated and dated Mary Fields in addition to Polly — Tom’s ex-girlfriend, who we can presume is ten years older than Seb. And of course we get little details like David Bragge, who Polly realizes was flirting uncomfortably with her when she was far too young to understand it. Or how Mary Fields treats eleven-year-old Polly like a catty romantic rival to Tom. Like… it just keeps coming up. I do think that some of the horror of Tom’s situation is not just realizing what he’s having to do with Polly to stay alive. It’s also hating how his situation (forced on him by Laurel) is forcing him in turn to be a sort-of Laurel to Polly.
2. I’ve said there are mirrors to the age-difference in the novel — there are also a lot of mirrors to Laurel herself, and to her possessive type of “love”. Those mirrors feel important to me. Ivy is a major one (I seem to recall DWJ herself describing Ivy as a “failed Laurel” though I may be misremembering). Seb is another major one, and far more deliberate than I noticed at first. The thing is, he doesn’t just try to pull Polly away from Tom by playing the role of her beau (which he admits is an intentional ploy, in that shouting match with Mr. Leroy at the fair). It’s also that he mimics Laurel’s approach to possessive love, and not just by being visibly manipulative. Remember that he takes Polly’s photograph and hangs it up — just like Laurel does with all her victims. I think we are meant to notice this. Photographs are powerful in this book, and it is typical of DWJ to seed this subtly and leave it up to us to see the pattern. Oh, and there are other smaller mirrors to Laurel, of course, such as Joanna exerting possessive control over Reg (to the extent of her priorities totally overriding Reg’s, to the exclusion of his own daughter). Oh, and of course: Polly herself.
When Polly does her bit of black magic and invades Tom’s space, to try to force him to speak, it is the closest she ever comes to behaving exactly like Laurel over Tom — as if she owns Tom, and can command him and force him.
I think it’s one of the more interesting parts of the novel, how Tom almost becomes like Laurel in how he takes over Polly’s life when she’s young, and Polly almost becomes like Laurel in how possessive she grows over him. I love the way DWJ does this. And it’s why that ending is so satisfying to me. As DWJ says herself: “…it was precisely by hanging on to Tom and being overcurious that Polly had lost him…. It was clear to me that the only redress she could make was the reverse of possessiveness — complete generosity… She has to love Tom enough to let him go…”
The Janet approach to beating Laurel by hanging on to Tom is too similar to how Laurel operates herself. This is one reason DWJ keeps having the words “dead end” appear at the ending, when Polly is trying to figure out what the hell to do — she realizes that defeating Laurel is a losing game if it ends with both Polly and Tom replicating different parts of Laurel’s dynamic. They need to find another way forward. Hence Polly’s challenge, and the strange battle between Tom and Mr. Leroy… Both Polly and Tom create a new type of ending to the Tam Lin myth.
And, at this end, they’re finally free to talk openly about how they’ve both hurt one another. But also how they’ve saved one another. They don’t know if they’ll work as a couple. But they’re able to meet each other as equals for the first time.
3.And now, the big one.
(Also, let me put a break here because this got long.)
Hello my little goblins! I’ve been radio silent for a bit because I just moved and moving is hectic and stressful, but now I’m back! I’ll be doing a countdown to Halloween in October, and I might start early. This is also your semi-annual reminder that ANYONE CAN SUBMIT A REVIEW!
To hold you over until I get a real review done, here are some books I’ve read recently and LOVED TO BITS that you should read.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (swashbuckling con men in an awesome fantasy world, lots of diversity, and they call themselves the Gentlemen Bastards WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT)
Illusions of Fate by Kiersten White (excellent YA with a POC woman protag and some great discussions of discrimination and race, plus a fun magic system and a good love story)
Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (a little dated at this point, but a really lovely retelling of the traditional Thomas the Rhymer story. A good read in conjunction with…)
Tam Lin by Pamela Dean (a fun retelling of Tam Lin set in the ‘70s in a private liberal arts college loosely based on Carleton.)
Okay bookworms! Time to read a little more of I, Asimov before conking out like the victim of one of Hermione's stupefys.
In the midst of the Clone Wars, Obi-Wan very abruptly goes on leave to attend a “personal matter” on his homeworld Stewjon. Both Cody and the Jedi find this somewhat odd, and Cody goes on leave himself to investigate. He finds his General at a banquet meant to celebrate the new Fae King… which turns out to be Obi-Wan himself. Or: Tam Lin but Codywan.
(I have a lot of art for the swbigbang that will be trickling over to tumblr over the next week or so, but please feel free to take a gander at everything on ao3 in the meantime!)
