Tamar: A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal by Mal Peet | eBook

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In the final winter of World War II, two young Dutchmen parachute into their Nazi-occupied homeland; they're Resistance fighters, code-named Dart and Tamar. Fifty years later, one of these two soldiers makes a jump of a different sort -- this one without a parachute -- to his death. Left behind is a box labeled with his granddaughter's name, Tamar; inside are hidden messages and clues to his enigmatic life. These two stories -- Tamar's and her grandfather's -- separated by half a century, dovetail in Peet's thrilling tale of love, jealousy, betrayal, and the terrifying world of Resistance fighters.

Accompanied by her Dutch cousin, Yoyo, Tamar sets out to find the source of her namesake river, and to decipher the mystery her grandfather entrusted to her. Twisting through their journey, like the river they follow, is the gripping narrative of those brave fighters who half a century ago fought the Nazis and what was to prove an even greater foe: the cold, hunger, sickness, isolation, fear, and mind-numbing boredom of simply waiting.

Tamar is a story so irresistible you'll never want it to end, a historical novel with all the suspense of a nail-biting thriller, and a book that readers will find impossible to put down. (Spring 2007 Selection)

Publishers Weekly

Peet's (Keeper) novel employs separate narrative threads to track the grief of a teen puzzling out her grandfather's suicide, and the same man's youth in Holland during WWII, where he and another Dutchman worked with the British to repel the Nazi occupation. Both men have code names and fake passports: Tamar's charge is to repair the fractured local resistance movement; Dart runs the wireless, sending and receiving encrypted messages. Fear of capture constantly stalks each, but Tamar is quartered on the site of a previous missionâ€”a farm owned by Marijke, his beautiful lover. Dart is posing as a doctor at a nearby insane asylum, staying alert for late-night transmissions by popping Benzedrine. As winter sets in, so do hunger and desperation. It becomes less clear who the enemy is, as the locals resist Tamar's leadership, and Dart misunderstands Marijke's feelings for him and her relationship with Tamar. Only one man returns to England after the warâ€”and it is his granddaughter, also named Tamar, who receives a box of effects following his death. She then undertakes a journey to understand the box's mysterious contents. Identity confusion is a topic near and dear to teenage hearts, but Peet doesn't introduce the younger Tamar until 100 pages in, and doesn't develop her story nearly as well as her grandfather's. Comparisons to Aidan Chambers's Postcards From No Man's Landare inevitableâ€”readers who savored it may also take to this complex tale about how war casualties can keep accruing, generations after the battle ends. Ages 14-up. (Feb.)

KLIATT - Claire Rosser

This lengthy novel tells how the horrors of WW II terrorism (aka resistance fighting) affect three generations in one family. It reads like a thriller, with the action of wartime (winter, l945) interspersed with mysteries of identity in l995. The YA component is that the 15-year-old granddaughter, Tamar, who adores her grandfather, finds out when he commits suicide that his secrets from l945 ruined the life of his son, Tamar's father. Uncovering the truth changes everything about her family. The resistance action takes place in Holland during the last winter of the war. Two young Dutchmen, trained and "run" by the British, are holed up in a remote area where they both fall in love with Marijke, the young woman at the farm where they are hiding. The spy code-named Tamar (after a river in Cornwall) is having an affair with Marijke and the other young man, code-named Dart, is obsessively jealous. Peet describes their incandescent lives so well that we understand how sleep and food deprivation, constant fear, and suffering and violence make them emotionally unbalanced, to say the least. The granddaughter Tamar is given a package after the death of her grandfather, which leads her on a quest to discover the truth about what happened in Holland so long ago. This is a demanding, carefully written story, with dreadful details of betrayal and violence. Winner of the 2006 Carnegie Medal.

VOYA - Cindy Lombardo

With surgical precision, Peet explores universal themes of fear and suspicion, trust and compassion in this multilayered and complex story of the twisted relationship between two comrades in arms and their love for the same woman. As members of the resistance fighting in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II, Tamar and Dart share days and nights of gut-wrenching fear and mind-numbing boredom, made endurable only by the seeming safety of Sanctuary Farm and the simple creature comforts it offers. In an alternate story line years later, a young girl named Tamar inherits a small box filled with clues and codes from her grandfather, who has fallen to his death from a balcony window. As she struggles to decipher the messages it contains, she unravels a dark tale of passion, evil, and tragedy that has the capacity to destroy or to reunite her own family. Skillfully interweaving the secrecy of the past with the uncertainty of modern day and moving fluidly across time, the author creates a lyrical tale of integrity and betrayal that takes place in both the past and the present. Filled with compelling and deeply disturbing images of the horrors of war, the feelings and questions raised by this winner of the prestigious Carnegie Medal will remain with the reader long after the last page has been turned.

Kirkus Reviews

In 1944, Dart and Tamar, code names for two undercover operatives for Britain's Special Operations Executive, parachute into Holland to reorganize the Dutch resistance movement. In 1955, a 15-year-old British girl named Tamar receives a box from her grandfather who has committed suicide. In it are clues to her grandfather's past and her own identity, but she must go on a journey to make sense of the clues. In Peet's Carnegie Medal-winning work, he tells the interwoven stories of Tamar the spy and Tamar the teenager in beautifully visualized episodes. Meticulously crafted scenes develop this long, complex and elegant work that is both a historical novel and a reflection on history-how a young girl's life has been shaped by a past she never knew. Readers will be torn: They'll want to slow down and savor the gorgeously detailed prose, but speed up to find out what happens next. Simply superb. (notes, acknowledgments) (Fiction. YA)

From the Publisher

Simply superb.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

This powerful story will grow richer with each reading.
—Booklist (starred review)

An extraordinary, gripping novel.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

A considerable original achievement.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (starred review)

Tamar: A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal

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