I first heard about Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary after reading her wonderful modern retelling of the Scottish ballad, Tam Lin. (More on that book, which was recently reissued as a tpb, in my September column). Like Tam Lin, Juniper is a deep rich story full of family and friends that offers hints along the way to something fantastical and strange. It is only in the book's final pages that we learn just what may have been going on all along, and the dangers presented by a young man who insinuated himself into the lives of three sisters.

But that's the end, and this book is really all about the journey.

Juniper is 16, Gentian 13 and Rosemary is 11. They are the most typical of sisters, fighting and consoling as the situation warrants. Gentian is the story's main character and Dean has done a great job of creating a most appealing female protagonist. First off, she is an astronomer - not "wants to be an astronomer" or "plans to be an astronomer", she is one and everyone in her family (and all of her friends) accept that. She has an attic bedroom in her family's rambling Victorian and due to an earlier resident, access to a dome for sky watching. Her telescope is of paramount importance to her, as she is downright geeky about all things star gazy. She is also a rabid bibliophile (like her best friend Becky, a poet). Here's just a taste of Gentian, from a passage about packing to spend the night at Becky's:

Toothbrush, hairbrush. the biography of Maria Mitchell. Her current notebook. Pride and Prejudice, Julius Caeser, Owl in Love, The Princess and Curdie, the last four issues of Sky and Telescope, Carl Sagan's Comet, and the The Space Child's Mother Goose. Several pens, a protractor, a stylus. The binoculars in their case. Her ephermis. Her father's CD of Laurie Anderson's "Strange Angels." Her own CD of Holst's "The Planets." Some stray chocolate-chip cookies from Junie's last batch. The suitcase was full. Gentian considered it and crammed a set of astronomical postcards into one side pocket. This late in the year, there was a danger of being snowed in. There had been Halloween blizzards before.

Okay, I love her - how can you not love her? She is so certain of who she is and who she plans to be, it's absolutely awesome. Of course that's what makes the story so compelling as her new neighbor Dominic slowly unravels all that certainty and it takes everything Gentian has to fight back - and to stay true to what matters.

I couldn't help but think that if she was a girl who everyone patted on the head about her astronomy interests and was told that was something grown-ups did that she might not have been able to stand up to Dominic when it mattered. In other words, she might not have had any idea that she was losing so much to him if she wasn't already certain of how much she had to lose.

Now there's a lesson we all could stand to learn.

On top of her very cool family, Gentian also has a group of friends, the "Giant Ants" who have been together forever and are struggling to stay that way in their teenage years. Their determination to stay loyal is critical to the story and makes me wonder just how unusual that sort of commitment really is. Even though their interests are changing (astronomy, poetry, fashion, sports, boys, etc) they still seek common ground. The Giant Ants know something is going wrong with Gentian because they know she would never just drop them - they don't do that to each other. On that level, the book is very much about the power of friendship and a textbook for how to be a good (and still solidly individual) friend.

Juniper unfolds at a leisurely pace as we meet the sisters and their tolerant and smart parents, and are first introduced to the mystery of Dominic who's family builds a house and moves in apparently in days (although everyone else forgets this, Gentian remembers). There is much talk of Shakespeare and Maria Mitchell, sexism and poetry, sewing and gender identity. Cookies and brownies are baked and Halloween costumes created. And through all of the talk of friends and boys and school there is the specter of Dominic who speaks only in quotes and tells the sisters he wants their help to build a time machine. They offer their empty attic as a lab and get to work, although soon it is only Gentian that is involved. And then the book takes its dark turn and we see just who or what Dominic might be and what his designs are on the sisters.

I will drop a hint, that Dean based Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary on Child Ballad #1, "Riddles Wisely Expounded," which will give a bit of the plot away, but only a bit, and the joy here is in the reading anyway. Here is more from the text:

"Tell me what you've been reading," said Gentian.
Erin had been reading The Origin of Species, Rock 'n' Roll Summer, Weetzie Bat, The Night Gift, The Giver, The Wonderful Flight of the Mushroom Planet and Morphogenesis.
Gentian inquired respectfully after all the ones she had not read. Before she became an astronomer, she too had read as copiously and voraciously as Erin. She had even looked in astronomical catalogs for the special filter that, according to the Mushroom Planet books, would allow her to see Basidium through a telescope. She should remember how much there was to read, the next time she was balked by the weather.

These are smart girls - brilliantly, joyfully, smart and creative girls - and reading about their adventures was purely joy. I have read some reviewers who felt the ending was rushed or too ambiguous, but I think the ballad gives enough clues and the story does the rest. It's not all wrapped up with the a bow but the point is not really Dominic anyway - the point was always Gentian and her friends and family. And that is why I simply love this book.

[Post title, lyric from Laurie Anderson's as quoted in JG&R, pictures of Maria Mitchell, first female professor of astronomy in the US and astronomy picture from Linda Hall Library of Science & Engineering.]