Tamar: A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal Paperback – Box set, September 9, 2008

I wanted to give TAMAR five stars, it was that good. I thought about it off and on for days after finishing. (And normally I forget a book once it's read, except when I buy it again and realize after a couple of chapters I've already read it!)TAMAR grabbed me right away, when an old man asks his son to name his coming baby Tamar. The son conmplies and the stage is set for the story to unfold. When Tamar is fifteen, she sets out on a journey up the Tamar River in England, going to places her grandfather marked for her. She hopes to discover his past.Part of the book is written from her POV on her journey. The other parts come from the POVs of two Dutchmen, code names Tamar and Dart, who were parachuted into Nazy occupied Holland during WWII to aid the resistance. The switch between present and past is effortless, probably because Tamar always uses first person for her accounts.Peet gives a moving picture as to life in Holland under the occupation. An unwed mother serving as a courier. The fearful heroism of people who risk their lives to keep radio signals between England and Holland alive. The food shortages. The soldiers' threat.We follow Tamar and Dart's mental processes, watch them deteriorate, panic, rise up in heroism. And there's a love story, between Tamar and the namesake Tamar's grandmother.The one thing that disappointed me was that the plot came apart toward the ending. Present day events came about that depended on events during the war being known to the current cast, that (unless I missed something and I very well could have) we the readers knew, but left us puzzled as to how the others not involved knew them.If it hadn't been for that, the plot coming apart toward the end, I would surely had given it five stars.This book's for anyone -- not just young adults -- who likes history, romance, and good writing.

I have read many books in my life. However it’s been a long time since I read something that made me want to rip the book’s pages out. I thought this was Tamar. Now I think back and I realize it isn’t as horrible as I thought it was, but I see why it wasn’t a Best Seller. Tamar tells two stories. The first one takes place in Holland during the Holocaust. It talks about two undercover agents Dart and Tamar who both fall for the same girl Marijke. The other story is about a girl named Tamar who goes on an adventure with her cousin to discover the truth behind her deceased grandfather, while her grandmother rots in an asylum. Do to the fact that there is a lot more bad things about Tamar I’m going to start with the good things. Mal Peet (author) writes in a bizarre way at times sounding like a teenaged girl writing a fanfiction, and at other times like an actual professional author. The times when the writing doesn’t make me unconsciously roll my eyes it is actually very interesting. He uses the perfect clear descriptions necessary for the genre and the character’s are put into realistic situations. Yet there is a glaring issue that isn’t in the background but in the core of the novel. The romance. I understand that the author thought it could spice things up, but it didn’t. It was a poorly written stereotypical love triangle in WWII. A part from that Dart got really obsessive tendencies thinking about Marijke. He was introduced as a calm character and once he started liking Marijke his character completely changed. It was so radical and out of character it didn’t even seem like something a human being would do. I understand he was in a war but it didn’t make any sense. I have mostly talked about the WWII portion of the book mostly because if anything the “present times” was even more flawed. The main character was the character that now plagues every YA novel, a self centered teenage girl with a sad life. Well, what the author tries to transmit as a sad life. In reality “Tamar” (the girl) lives a rich life in London with the only tragedy being her dad’s death which happened years before the main timeline of the novel. A part from that her love story ends up being super rushed and down right disgusting. I really didn’t care if her cousin Yo Yo was only partially her cousin, it was still disgusting. Overall Tamar was a bad novel. It had it’s ‘ok’ moments but it was still bad. It had underdeveloped characters, and rushed plotlines.

I love stories about WWII, but only if they are very well written and edited and very realistic. I read many of the Amazon reviews on this book before buying it, always starting with the one-star, going to the two and three-star reviews before making my decision. I decided to take a chance on this book and am very, very glad I did. Very well edited. The author obviously did a fantastic job researching the subjects, archived war files, even interviewing a surviving veteran parachutist who worked with the Dutch resistance just as the main characters did. The characters are so real, wonderfully crafted and developed, they pop off the page. Descriptions of the environments and scenery - just wonderful. Great suspense, mystery, twists and turns. So very accurate, even the weapons used by the Allies and Germans throughout the story. The story moves at a perfect pace, does not bog down. It was hard to put this book down, and I always looked forward to getting back into the story. Long chapters, alternating between 1944/45 and 1995 when the granddaughter becomes interested in her grand parents mysterious past stories. In my mind this is a clear five-star story. Mal Peet - congratulations on a wonderfully crafted tale of high adventure, personal experiences, the horrors of war and the evil inflicted upon the Dutch civilians by the invading Nazis. If you are interested in the subject matter, I recommend Tamar.

A dual narrative historical fiction set in 1945 occupied Holland and 1995 England, Tamar tells the story of two SOE spies. Meticulously researched details vividly fill the story with issues such as hunger, benzedrine dependence, code silks and suicide pills. The two spies parachuted into enemy occupied Holland are code named Tamar and Dart. Their relationship soon becomes soured as Dart realises that Tamar is in love with Marijke, a woman who lives on the farm they are assigned to. Meanwhile, in 1995 England, Tamar the 16 year old granddaughter traces the history of what happened to her family in the war years with the help of a box her grandfather leaves her after his suicide.I was enormously moved and gripped by this sensitively told story. It would suit thoughtful teenagers who have an understanding of the war. There are some scenes of mass killings which are disturbingly chilling and vivid. At one point in the book Tamar says to his girlfriend something like, "What I worry about is whether we can go through all this and still be human after the war," and indeed this does seem to be the major theme of the book to me. How much suffering can people undergo and retain their humanity to others, and not become suspicious and hateful?The twists and turns at the end of the book had me turning the last 50 pages unable to put the book down. A superb denouement is well worth waiting for. It's a long read at 430 pages but well worth it, and the book doesn't seem a page too long. I have had it on my to-be-read bookshelf since 2006, and what a gem I have missed all those years. This is the sort of book you could read twice, to pick up the clues that you miss the first time round.A worthy winner of the Carnegie. Stunning writing.

In many ways this novel is well written and the way the author describes things is very skillful, but there were some serious flaws in the plot line which I found distracting and not very believable. **SPOILER ALERT** For example why would the grandmother not have told her son that his father had died and the guy bringing him up was his friend?? If she didn't suspect any foul play, wouldn't she have just been honest about the situation to her son?Another reviewer said that they didn't really care for the parts about the granddaughter and I'm inclined to agree, especially the very long winded descriptions of tracing a river which we, the reader, know has nothing to do with why the name Tamar was chosen. Those bits were really boring, though very beautifully described - but I bought this because I was promised espionage, passion and betrayal! Not long boring descriptions of a river that seems irrelevant to the plot! Somehow I managed to miss the fact that the girl's father had disappeared, so when he showed up I was a bit confused! I think there were just a few too many threads in this novel that didn't tie together in a very satisfying way! The way that the grandddaughter seemed to forgive the man she had believed to be her grandfather was touching but lacked depth as she didn't even seem to process any emotions (although she had been processing things a lot throughout the rest of the book) about it. It just seemed a bit strange. Not a total waste of time but overall this read left me feeling dissatisfied.

This book is well written, well researched and keeps you turning the page with its tense and masterful plotting. It deals with the subject of the Dutch Resistance and SOE at the end of WW2, and the story is so exciting I can't believe nobody has picked up the film rights yet.The story is actually in two strands. The narrative of a sixteen year old girl, the Tamar of the story, whose grandfather commits suicide in 1995. He leaves behind a box for her filled with clues which she must follow to unravel the mysteries of her grandfather's past. This sounds trite but it isn't. It is written with realism and a kind of gut wrenching honesty that roots it firmly in believable territory.The other narrative strand is the activities of two SOE operatives in Holland, Tamar and Dart and their mission during what the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945, when the Germans, aware they were losing the war were attempting to 'tidy' up some of their activities, including those in Holland.This is a book for teenagers, probably older teenagers as the subject matter is not shied away from. It reminded me in a lot of ways of the excellent 'Postcards from No Man's Land' by Aidan Chambers, which deals with a lot of the same subject matter. I would highly recommend it for adults also, as there is nothing to pigeonhole it into the 'child' section of a bookshop, and at times it can be a really quite grim read. I loved it, and am now contemplating his other work despite the fact that it is about football.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this as much as I did, being neither in the target market (it's marketed as a YA novel) nor especially fond of WW2 stories, but Mal Peet's writing has a way of pulling you in, once you're past the first few pages. These could almost have been written by someone else and, as a writer myself, I suspect this is due to the fairly common mistake of overwriting and overthinking the introduction in an effort to make it as instantly irresistible as possible. But when Peet hits his stride, the writing really begins to flow and with occasional flashes of brilliant phrasing and original descriptive turn of phrase, it rewards perseverance.The book is written as an amalgam of two stories - a third-person retrospective on Grandfather Tamar's time as an SOE spy in Holland interspersed with a first-person account of young Tamar's quest to understand the contents of the box he (Grandad) has left to her after his death by suicide - and for me the former worked better than the latter. Whether this is due to Peet's difficulty expressing himself as a 15yo girl, or my terminal disinterest in the thoughts of said girl is hard to judge. Probably a combination of the two.The story is generally well structured, although the plot does fall down in two major places for me. Firstly young Tamar's father's behaviour when he learns "the family secret" is unbelievably extreme, and secondly having left home, the way he magically turns up in the middle of Tamar's quest seems way too convenient. These minor quibbles aside, along with the fact that the much-vaunted "plot twist" is sufficiently well telegraphed for any experienced reader to be able to guess it fairly early on in the narrative, Tamar provides an easy and entertaining read which deserves its place in the top quartile of our book club's back catalogue.

Billed as a YA read, this book puts many so-called adult books to shame. Set in 1945, this is a tense, compelling and emotional story on so many levels. Tamar and Dart are parachuted into Nazi-occupied Holland to try to unify the various elements of the Dutch resistance - and a terrifying love triangle is formed, the repercussions of which will reverberate into the next two generations.I really loved this book and read it with a dreadful sense of not wanting the end to come. Peet writes really well, balancing a vivid imagination with an emotional restraint that creates real emotion in the text. His characters are deftly sketched, and the love affair at the centre of the book is one which feels all the more deep and heartfelt precisely because of the author's moderation and discipline.But this is also far more than another war-time love story, or even another war-time atrocities tale, though both are, necessarily, there. The fear, the courage, the boredom, the frustration, are all conveyed economically and lucidly, and even the set pieces feel fresh and keen.I didn't find this flawless, and the modern day story of young Tamar trying to piece together her grandfather's history really didn't work for me - and I felt it really only became important at the end.Despite that, however, this really is an outstanding read, and refreshingly free from sentimentality. I loved this and will certainly read it again.