It begins to seem that perhaps she doesn't really want to remember what it is. She needs to move on, she should have moved on long ago, but there's something she needs to do first, and she can't remember what it is. Tamsin has been dead for three hundred years, having died around the time of the Bloody Assizes, in 1685. After a little more time, Jenny meets the Persian's person, Tamsin Willoughby, the daughter of Roger Willoughby, the founder of Stourhead Farm. There are lots of hints, but eventually Mister Cat brings Jenny proof, in the form of his new girlfriend, a ghost Persian. She does eventually meet a girl at school, Meena Chari, whose efforts at friendship she cannot defeat, and eventually the six months are over and she gets Mister Cat back, and things get a little better. Jenny's a real pill through all this, and she knows it, and it's mostly intentional. And the house they'll be living in turns out to be barely habitable. Also, at least she'll be living in London, and she'll like London.Įxcept that Evan gets a new job, managing a farm in Dorset. But her new stepbrothers, Tony and Julian, aren't too bad. She'll be leaving her friends, her life, and Mister Cat will spend six months in quarantine. She's a bit of a misfit at school, which most adolescents are, but she has two friends she spends a lot of time with, and she has a cat, Mister Cat.Īnd then her mother announces she's marrying her boyfriend, Evan McHugh, and that she and Jenny are moving to England with him. Jenny Gluckstein is thirteen years old, and living with her divorced mother, a music teacher in New York, and visiting regularly with her father, an opera singer. It's a bit scarier that Peter Beagle seems to remember being an adolescent girl. That seems normal enough, because I was one for several years.

Tamsin by Peter S. Beagle