I thought that the cover looked quite dull and the book looked very long and tedious, as it is over 400 pages of small print with no illustrations. It is a paperback book with a yellowy brown cover with the silhouette of two people and a plane. I started to read the first chapter before reading the prologue and it didn’t make much sense until I decided to read the prologue and see what I had missed. The first bits of the book started off quite boring and I have to say I would have put it down were it not a Carnegie shortlisted book which I had to read. It got a bit better, but didn’t really get that good until it went into the 1995 section.

Tamar is about two SOE agents who are sent into wartime Holland to work in the resistance. Marijke had been waiting for Tamar, one of the agents to return: Tamar had been and stayed at Marijke and her grandfather’s farm before, and they had fallen in love. Dart, the second agent, had also fallen in love with Marijke and is filled with jealousy when he finds out about Tamar and Marijke.

Tamar also keeps swapping between Nazi-occupied Holland and England in 1995 where another girl, who is 15 and also called Tamar, unravels the two SOE agents’ life through a box that her grandfather left her when he jumped off a high building to commit suicide. 

Dart felt a bitter howl climbing in his throat and jammed the side of his thumb between his teeth to stifle it. He forced himself back from the window. He slipped and staggered but did not fall.

It was as though we had walked into a child’s drawing, the colours of everything were so bright and simple. The green grass levelled and then fell away between beds of cartoon-coloured flowers towards the sea, which was intensely, – impossibly – blue.

I found Tamar quite hard to read as there are three Tamars in it, and I would say that it is aimed at 13 year-olds and above. I would give it 6/10 as it is well-written, but I didn’t like the story and I found it quite confusing.