If anything can get the teen angst thing shifted into high, it’s a situation like this.īut things change when Jenny encounters the ghost of Tamsin Willoughby, the daughter of the man who originally founded the farm more than three hundred years before. Miserable beyond words, not least over the six months her beloved cat will have to spend in quarantine, Jenny finds her life uprooted and herself saddled with a new stepdad and two stepbrothers, the youngest of whom attaches himself to her immediately. Sally is marrying an Englishman named Evan who, to Jenny’s horror, is about to whisk them all away to the British countryside in Dorset, where he’s been hired to restore a manor house more than 300 years old and turn the surrounding land into a functioning farm. Jenny Gluckstein is a disaffected and sullen adolescent living in New York with a mother from whom she feels so disconnected that she calls her, not “Mom,” but by her first name, Sally. The book was a well-deserved World Fantasy Award finalist. But Tamsin is far better focused than that book, and it succeeds at not only giving a nice little spin to the haunted house story - it’s the ghost here who needs rescuing - but also in weaving it into a historical fantasy framework and topping the whole thing off with a coming-of-age theme. It’s similar to The Folk of the Air in that it follows a more conventional fantasy narrative than Beagle’s earliest work. Tamsin is a contemporary young adult fantasy that stands as another high-water mark in a career consisting of practically nothing but. Beagle novels, you know that what you’re getting is something that has been lovingly and painstakingly crafted, and thus to be cherished.

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Tamsin peter beagle