2012 book 228

Mal Peet's Tamar
I really enjoyed Peet's Life: An Exploded Diagram and this was sort of in the same mold--a coming of age/humanity in wartime sort of story. Except here, they're actually two stories--the first takes place during WWII and involves two British spies in Holland, and the interspersed second takes place fifty years later and involves one of the men's granddaughter. There's a lot of foreshadowing and it's easy to guess where the 1944 plot will go--I'm honestly not sure whether that's on purpose--which makes it very hard to read at times. It's a /good/ book, but not entirely an /enjoyable/ one. Granddaughter Tamar is great, though, and I wish we'd gotten to see more of her journey. And this is another Peet book that is theoretically YA, but isn't really YA at all, especially since only one of the four main characters is even a teenager. Coming of age and YA are different categories, people! B+.