Number 21 is The Dubious Hills by Pamela Dean. Dean wrote one of my all time favourite books Tamlin. I reread that book over and over again. So, because of this long term affection for Tamlin, I've of course read other books by Dean, hoping others have been as good.

They haven't. Basically, I've been pretty disappointed with the rest of her output overall. I wasn't even able to finish The Hidden Country which was about a group of children who find their way into another world (yeah, what SHOULDN'T I like about this conceit?), but the kids are so damn precocious I just couldn't handle them after awhile. So I stopped.

The Dubious Hills also have precocious children, but I was better able to handle them. The main character, Arry is all of fourteen years old and is raising her younger brother Beldi (9) and sister, Con (6). Their parents basically disappeared one day and that was that. Fortunately, the community they live in, the Dubious Hills is a true community, everyone helps everyone and pretty much begrudges no one anything.

This is due to a rather strange spell that was placed on the community ages ago, after a particularly devestating wizards' war. The wizards decided that war could be avoided if no one person had too much knowledge, so they made it that every person in the Dubious Hills would know only about one specific knowledge, or 'province' as they call them. So only one person knows about history, only one person knows about stories, only one can tell if things are beautiful or not, only one can explain the intricacies of language, etc. This makes for a community thoroughly dependent on one another, but strangely, they're not ignorant. They have no problem in admitting they do not know something, because basically, there will be a person who does.

Arry's province is that of pain. Pain is something only she can experience, on behalf of the others, so she can tell them if they are hurt or not. This makes her the Physci, obviously one of the more important provinces of knowledge, and it seems to be a difficult province for one so young to have. But Arry is smart and has had to grow up slightly quicker than she would probably like to, and she is forced to grow up even more when the wolves start coming around.

Like all good fairy tales, there are wolves in this one. And the wolves bring a knowledge of their own, a complete one, where they have lost their specialized knowledge, but now have a wider, more worldly knowledge. One of the wolves, the Hills' teacher, wants everyone in the Hills to follow his path and become a wolf. But not everyone wants this. They are content with what they know. They live in a very peaceful, almost idyllic place. Everyone knows everyone and everyone shares with everyone. This is something the wolf threatens to shatter.

The ending seemed to come from almost nowhere, and I almost wondered how they jumped to the conclusion on how to deal with the wolf, because it was an option that was never really touched on much throughout. Violence wasn't part of their lives (from what I could tell) before the wolves came, so I did wonder how they reached the decision to use it.

Overall though, I did enjoy this book far more than I have her other efforts. Its a well crafted world with an interesting idea (the knowledge provinces) and has that good sense of the familiar but still definitely Other. While I don't love it as much as Tamlin, I may revisit this one again.