Was he meant to be the devil? I was out of sorts with this book from the get-go, and I may not have been giving it my undivided attention, I’m afraid. I remember feeling like it was shades of Diana Wynne Jones’s The Time of the Ghost, which also features a creepy dude in whom a group of sisters is interested, and at the time I didn’t like TTotG, so that didn’t make me love Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary any better.

Dominic is boring, but I think he’s supposed to be because he’s just a symbol. Yeah, I wanted a book with a cute mysterious boy who got revealed, but I was kind of impressed by Dean’s toughness in insisting on not giving me what I wanted and writing a book that turned out to be JUST about the girls. Dominic’s ultimate boringness was meant to say something about the opposite-sex ideals created by sex-and-imagination-crazed adolescent psychology, that eventually get exploded by real exposure to other members of the opposite sex. Also he wasn’t he meant to be the devil?

Maybe I’ll try again with it, too. I think I paperbackswapped my copy away, so it more or less depends on me finding it cheap at a used bookstore…

Have you read anything else by her? I tried reading The Secret Country right after I read Tam Lin, thinking, hey, no way to lose here, it’s by the same author who wrote that book I couldn’t put down, plus it sounds just like Narnia!, and I didn’t even get a quarter of the way through. After trying Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, I came to the conclusion that Pamela Dean is a one-hit wonder. Oh well, I’ll always have Tam Lin.

But there’s just no excuse for how unpleasant everyone was in Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. If you do read it, tell me what you think – I’m afraid I may have been too hard on all the characters. 🙂