Peter S. Beagle. Tamsin. Roc, 1999. ISBN 978-0451457639 288 pp. $

*****

Jenny delivers an account of her move to Dorset England after her mother’s remarriage to a farming soil expert, which results in her acquaintance of many supernatural creatures such as bogarts, pookas and a billy. She slowly becomes friends with the ghost of their residence, a 300 year old apparition named Tamsin, who can’t remember what she has to do to be freed from this earth. Jenny picks up her story in bits and pieces, revealing that the ghostly Wild Hunt passes over frequently.

Although the start is slow, the writing is tantalizing–Jenny, now 19, is writing down the events and talking to herself and the reader as she goes along, and as she tries to set the stage and not get ahead of herself, the reader is hooked, trying to figure out exactly what is going on. This lends a disturbingly realistic feel to the plot, and makes the reader believe that those long ago myths are entirely possible today.