‘Tam Lin’ by Pamela Dean

O I forbid you, maidens a', That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh, For young Tam Lin is there.

  In that often told Scottish Border legend, Pamela Dean found the inspiration for a college fantasy, where young Janet Carter  is a budding university student  who finds herself confronting the supernatural world of the Fae.
  Tam Lin operates on several levels — it's Janet's coming-of-age experience in the 1970s. It's a resonatingly accurate look at the dynamics of strangers pushed together as roommates who become friends. It's a perceptive treatment of how relationships bud and wilt under the pressure of academics and personal expectations that don't always jibe. And, what I enjoyed the most, it's a great collection of literary asides that will thrill the inner English major.
  That's the backdrop for the fantasy, which has the Fairy Queen and her Court spending part of their immortal lives as faculty and staff at the obscure Minnesota campus where Janet's father is a professor. Janet has no idea what she's in for when she and her friends fall in with part of the supernatural contingent, some of whom have lived so long they remember acting with Shakespeare. But immortality comes with a price, and as Janet embarks on her fourth year of college, it becomes stunningly clear that the price is going to be paid by Thomas Lane, Dean's incarnation of the Tam Lin of the ballad and Janet's impulsive college romance.
  Those familiar with the ballad won't be disappointed by the story's climax.  So look past the cheesy cover on the latest edition and read past the slow start. It'll make you think twice about all those eccentric university Classics majors you never quite knew how to take.