By the time Janet realizes her danger and Thomas’s, she has only hours to make up her mind what to do. By then events are moving very quickly, the way those golden college days do after a certain point. Gradually he becomes part of her circle of friends and their significant others, though the two of them do not become an item until their fourth year at Blackstock-nearer the end of the book than one would expect. The Tam Lin of the original ballad becomes, in this book, a college kid named Thomas Lane who, surprisingly for the title character, doesn’t show his handsome face until a half-dozen chapters in, and then only to say something rude to Janet Carter and disappear in a huff. Transferring the setting to the campus of a small midwestern college in the 1970s, she weaves this eerie storyline into a tale of ghosts, time travelers, young people discovering love and friendship, and the magic of literature, especially English and ancient Greek. The author of the Secret Country trilogy, when asked to contribute a volume to a series of fairy-tale novelizations, delved instead into a traditional Scots ballad about a girl named Janet who saves her lover from being sacrificed to the powers of Hell by the Queen of Faerie.
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