Let's be honest, I checked this book out on the strength of the author's name and how big it was on the cover. Dude thinks his name is so much more important than the title, he MUST be a class act.* Just kidding, Mal, turns out you are pretty awesome.
So, Tamar. The thing with this book is that I think it is best if you know as little as possible about it. Which is to say, I knew very little from the cryptic jacket description, and I'm glad. Basically it's about secret operatives doing resistance stuff in Nazi-occupied Holland, spliced in with one of the operative's granddaughters learning about it. But not in an annoying, "Grampa, tell me a story!!" kind of way, or even a Princess Bride kind of way where you're always wishing Fred Savage would shut up and stop ruining the kissing parts. The two story lines are equally good, and the whole time you're sort of looking for clues to link them up or suddenly you'll learn things about the 1940s story/characters and then it'll switch to 1995 and you'll get an ah ha moment where you're putting details together but the chick can't because she's not reading a little narrative of the past...but not all lame and frustrating like that sounds. I kind of suck at writing tonight guys is the thing.**
The one thing that frustrated me with this book was that I wanted it to be more. I wanted it to be longer and have more details and more plot points and so on--and clocking in at over 400 pages already, that's kind of a big deal for a YA book. Really, I wanted this to be not a YA book--I wanted it to be like, "Sharon Kay Penman-does-for-WW2-what-she's-done-for-the-Plantagenets: But Actually Written By This Other Dude." And really now I'm sitting here what made this a YA book instead of general market. The only things I can think of: (1)the modern story line narrator is like 15, (2)there's no sex, even though there could have been. So what I'm saying is the granddaughter could have been a couple years older and old Mal could have embellished some parts he artfully skipped over, and this could've been 5th floor material instead of 4th. To speak in BYU library terms. Um.
I really liked the writing. Honestly that's not something I usually notice unless it's distractingly bad--I'm typically pretty story-centric. The characterization was really nice--I bought into complex characters, which is difficult to do, because if it's done too heavy handedly or whatever you just hate all the people who screw up, instead of pitying their tortured souls. But I was definitely engaging in some hard-core tortured soul pitying, so Mal did a good job. Although again, I wish there had been more. WE WANT MORE TORTURED SOULS, MAL. That's not what I meant--I just wished that once I bought into the characters, I had gotten to do more things with them. In the end it came down more to themes and characters fulfilling specific roles, almost like a drama more than a book. Does that make sense? Like, instead of having characters and then just having them do a bunch of random things that sort of works into rising action and so forth, it was set up so that these characters existed to fulfill a few specific actions, to create the situation in the modern day. So maybe that's just a function of framed narrative.
Does that make sense? Now I need someone else to go read this book so that they can either understand and agree or say that I'm wacky and need to get more sleep. Oh wait what if that is true ANYWAY? Yikes.
*Further apologies, Mal: not only do I know that you don't actually have any say over your book covers, I also, in finding this image, found a few other designs that are more democratic, and also a lot prettier?
**Oh man I also read some other reviews of Tamar when getting these images, and it reminded me of how other people are actually good at writing book reviews and don't just talk about Fred Savage ruining the sexual tension all the time. I think that both I and Fred Savage need to have a quiet moment to think about what we've done.
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