What do You think about The Secret Country (2003)?
Every October I reread Pamela Dean's Tam Lin because it's such a good Halloween book. But this year, I couldn't find my copy of Tam Lin, I'm sure I have it somewhere, but it hasn't resurfaced since we moved last spring. I'm sure it will eventually. Fortuitously, I was able to read The Secret Country instead. It's the first book in a trilogy about five cousins who play an on-going pretend game about a fantasy kingdom, and it becomes real and the kids are shocked and surprised and there they are. Because it's based on their own game, they have a general sense of how the "plot" is supposed to go, but things don't always work out the way they expect. The kids are fantastic characters, I love how they alternate between being thrilled to be in a magic adventure, and then indignant when they realize there isn't any normal breakfast food. It did remind me of a funny thing about Pamela Dean books -- that they are filled with things that go completely over my head, but seem like the kind of things that will make sense if you read the book again knowing how things turn out ... except they don't. Like Tam Lin is full of Nick and Robin doing things like exchanging meaningful glances, and I know how the book ends and I still have no idea what they were supposed to be so glanciful about. And Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary ... forget it. I have no idea what's going on most of the time. Usually I would be annoyed by this, but in the case of Pamela Dean, it makes me feel confident that she's brighter than I am. So it's good that she's in charge of the story.Grade: Solid A, although I will have to read the entire trilogy to be sure.Recommended: Very thoughtful, thorough YA fantasy, and it's serious but not so serious that you wish you were reading a book about grim totalitarian societies.
—Elizabeth K.
A group of children end up inside the imaginary world that they created as part of a secret game, and then they experience some of the adventures they used to play.I liked the characters, and the setting was fun because it fit with how a bunch of kids that age would create a fantasy kingdom, complete with enchanted forests, a wizard's tower, and unicorns. Unfortunately, the rest of the book had some serious issues.The kids were almost always confused about what was going on. They had a lot of knowledge about the country and its inhabitants, even if things in the game weren't quite the way they'd imagined them. That knowledge wasn't communicated effectively to me as a reader, especially thanks to the initial jumble of names and chatter about which child played which secondary character in which scene.There were a lot of arguments about if their trip to the Secret Country was real or a hallucination. The exact nature of their experience might become important in a later book, but anyone who's reading a fantasy novel is pretty much willing to go along with its premise. There was no need to talk it to death, all that navel-gazing held back the pace of the actual plot.If that ongoing disagreement wasn't enough, the characters spent a lot of time fighting over inconsequential things. It got old fast. Their motivations were also muddy, most of the time they seemed content to just go along with whatever was happening. I won't say they were entirely passive, but they were ineffective to the point of nearly being dull.Having said all that, I may pick the second one up if I come across it, because this book didn't really answer any of the questions it raised.
—Donna
You might wonder how I discovered this book. Well, my friends, even if you didn’t wonder, I’m going to tell you anyway. According to my somewhat possibly faulty memory, it happened something like this. I became aware of that fact that apparently on Goodreads you can review... fanfiction. As in, fanfiction—that, from what I gather, you can still find on fanfiction.net or what have you—can be found on its own page on Goodreads. And you can then review them.I wasn't sure how I should feel about this, so decided to do some Googling, to hear different sides out and that kind of thing. It seemed like something that would be a big topic. (Apparently not, though?) I was looking for articles, mainly, I think. Long story short, I ran across this record/article/thing on JournalFen. (Warnings: some cursing in link. If the link doesn’t work, please tell me and I’ll try to fix it.)What was revealed in the link was all new to me. I'm not gonna lie: I ended up checking out this book because I wondered what was so great about it that Cassandra Claire allegedly plagiarized it in fanfiction. Again, not gonna lie, I'm going to be honest and say I'm not too familiar with Claire's work. I know of it. I might have even read a book or two a few years ago (pretty sure I did), but clearly it didn't stick. I know she's a pretty popular YA author and I think there's a movie coming out based on her book series.So, now that you know how I found this book... let me tell you about this book. It has a simple premise: some close cousins play a make believe game together every summer. Then they find a world that is the very world that they made up. In this magical world, they are the characters they made up and acted as in the real world. Simple enough, right?But see, it's kind of fascinating. (view spoiler)[Because some of the things and plot the cousins made up for their game are off ever so slightly in their made up world they can visit. It raises interesting questions. Every time one of them did something not in the “original script” something Bad happens to basically get them back onto the original plot. (hide spoiler)]
—Grace
