"The year Janet started at Blackstock College, the Office of Residential Life had spent the summer removing from all the dormitories the old wooden bookcases that, on filled with books, fell over unless wedged. Chase and Philips' A new introduction to Greek was the favourite instrument for wedging; majors in the Classics used the remedial math textbook, but this caused the cases to develop a slight backward tilt, so that doughnuts, pens, student identification cards, concert tickets placed on top of them slid with indistinguishable slowness backward and eventually vanished dustily behind."

If this paragraph, which is the opening to Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, fills you with either a bittersweet nostalgia or a heady excitement, and the rather ponderous whimsicality of the style doesn't bother you, then it's probably the book for you. The thing is, it's either going to be the kind of book you adore, or the kind of book you don't get at all - and I'm firmly situated in the former camp. I loved this book, from the first word to the last, I loved it so much that my edition looks like it's been run over by a cement mixer because I couldn't bear to let it out of my hands for a single moment while I was reading it.

As you could probably have worked out by now, this ostensibly-YA/ostensibly-fantasy novel is a re-telling of the Ballad of Tam Lin set in a liberal arts college in the 1970s, except re-telling doesn't quite do it justice because it's far more than a simple cut n' paste job. The central story events are there - if you're looking for them - and they emerge more strongly at the end, but for the most part they seem almost secondary to the story of Janet's experience at college. What does come through very strongly, however, are the motifs and themes of the ballad, reworked in subtle and intriguing ways to fit their new context. So the Queen of Faerie is actually the head of the classics department, her court are her favoured students - the flamboyant aesthetes you were never quite cool enough to join - and mystical rites take place beneath the cloak of peculiar college traditions. The novel is redolent with a sense of enchantment, not just because there is a fairy ballad going on the background, but because being eighteen and at university seems the most magical prospect of all.

I think I'm just far away from actually being eighteen and at university to enjoy the nostalgia-trip. Tam Lin beautifully recreates the passionate foolishness of all it, overlaid by just enough to distance and irony to make it bearable. There's an awful lot going on in Tam Lin, taking the book far beyond the scope of the original ballad. The cast of characters is extensive to say the least, and their relationships with each other both detailed and complex; and the pace of the narrative, which occasionally veers unapologetically into poetry and literary criticism, is really rather slow. I can see why you might call it self-indulgent or get impatient with it but it works, both as story in itself and build-up to the already known conclusion. Since most readers will know the outcome of the story in advance, the various journeys - emotional, intellectual and literal - in the text become as significant as the eventual outcome.

The character of Janet is particularly well-drawn. She is appealing precisely because her primary traits, although admirable, seem terribly unheroinely: she is pragmatic and stubborn and impatient with people she doesn't understand. By contrast, Thomas remains rather an opaque figure, characterised mainly by his arresting beauty and his peculiar moods. Theirs is not a particularly romantic relationship at any point and, because the fantastical elements remain submerged for most of the novel, the truth about his plight only comes out about 50 pages in the time but their interactions do have a grounded believability to them. The end of the novel, when Janet finally claims Thomas from the Fairy Queen, is very much their beginning, and the enchantments it promises them - love, family, future - although less heady than those of fairyland are indisputably real.