WW2 historical fiction
4 stars
I was drawn drawn to read Tamar initially through already knowing of the Tamar river which runs along the Devon-Cornwall border. While the river itself does have a minor role to play in the novel, this story focuses primarily on events in a small area of the Netherlands during the last year of the Second World War. A young adult story, it doesn't go into intensely graphic wartime detail, but I felt Peet's writing was often even more impactful for what was left unsaid for readers to imagine. While the narrative itself is fictional, it is firmly rooted in true events and experiences and, in its atmosphere and storytelling, I was reminded of how I felt reading Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. I think readers who enjoyed that novel would appreciate this one, and vice versa.
I liked how Tamar's portrayal of the SOE agents wasn't the usual gung-ho …
I was drawn drawn to read Tamar initially through already knowing of the Tamar river which runs along the Devon-Cornwall border. While the river itself does have a minor role to play in the novel, this story focuses primarily on events in a small area of the Netherlands during the last year of the Second World War. A young adult story, it doesn't go into intensely graphic wartime detail, but I felt Peet's writing was often even more impactful for what was left unsaid for readers to imagine. While the narrative itself is fictional, it is firmly rooted in true events and experiences and, in its atmosphere and storytelling, I was reminded of how I felt reading Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. I think readers who enjoyed that novel would appreciate this one, and vice versa.
I liked how Tamar's portrayal of the SOE agents wasn't the usual gung-ho heroic depiction, but instead featured a more realistic interpretation of these men's war. I hadn't come across indications of amphetamine addiction amongst wireless operators before, and the emphasis on needing to be continually alert yet frequently bored senseless was a contradiction that I struggled to really get my head around. How could someone successfully reconcile those two opposing states of being? As many wireless operators lasted for less than three months, I guessed that they didn't.
The heart of the novel Tamar is a decades long love story which, in the present day narrative, is fragmenting as elderly Marijke succumbs to dementia, increasingly living in her past. Her husband's suspicious death leaves their granddaughter, also named Tamar, with a box of clues to a mystery she hadn't previously even known existed. This gives us readers our access to the historical storyline, however I think the novel would have been just as effective without that dual storyline device. While I appreciated Peet's sympathetic portrayal of Marijke's decline, and young Tamar is an interesting character in her own right, the modern storyline often felt more to me like padding than an integral part of this novel.