Secret Country

Pamela Dean says: "The Secret Country and its two sequels are books built on the love of other books. First, those I discovered as a child-Barbara Sleigh's Carbonel stories, with their tidy mixture of humor and sentiment; Lewis Carroll's Alice books, my earliest lessons about how to write dialogue; Robert A. Heinlein's juveniles, where I learned about voice and the deft conveyance of mounds of information; a handful of Andre Norton's science fiction novels, which first, I must confess, made me think about style, although Ray Bradbury's work, especially The October Country and Dandelion Wine, was part of that, too. I read some of these books quite early, and parts of all of them were still over my head when I was twelve. That is half of what made me write The Secret Country. "The other half was rereading all those books at the apparently wiser age of twenty or so and finding them shorter, flatter, less mysterious than I recalled their being. I set out-not, mercifully, realizing what I was letting myself in for-to write a book that was like the ones I had loved, but that would still seem long and many-faceted and mysterious to an older reader. Into the mix came influences discovered in the interim and loved just as passionately: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the work of Edward Eager and E. Nesbit and Dorothy Sayers and Jane Austen and Peter S. Beagle. "As so often happens, the books I actually wrote about the Secret Country were very different from what I had anticipated. But they please me, and I hope they will please readers who love the books that I love." Pamela Dean is also the author of Tam Lin; The Dubious Hills; and Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. She lives in a cluttered duplex in Minneapolis with her chosen family and eight cats. Visit her Web site at www.dd-b.net/pddb/, and "The Annotated Pamela Dean" at http://www.alittlebitofnotmuch.com/TAD/.Dean, Pamela is the author of 'Secret Country' with ISBN 9780142501535 and ISBN 0142501530.