Recent reads

Tamsin, by Peter Beagle. Well, it may not be The Last Unicorn or Come Lady Death, but Beagle is in fine form with this gothicly ghostly story. An teenage American girl is brought, much against her will, to live in a crumbling old mansion in the English countryside -- one of those Gormenghastly old places where the number of windows on the outside walls don't necessarily match the number visible on the inside walls. Things start to get strange when her cat takes up with a feline "girlfriend" with a disturbingly translucent aspect, and when Jenny meets Tamsin, a girl who lived and died in the mansion over three hundred years ago, they start to get very strange indeed.

The plot may sound hackneyed when described so shortly, but Beagle keeps the story gripping. Jenny is a believably naive and alienated teenager, and the story of Tamsin and her connection to some very dark events from the past is developed in a gradual and convincing fashion. I was even willing to forgive a kind of deus ex machina at the conclusion of the tale. A good read.