{"id":304,"date":"2021-02-03T10:58:31","date_gmt":"2021-02-03T10:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/?p=304"},"modified":"2021-02-03T10:58:31","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T10:58:31","slug":"tamar-by-mal-peet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/2021\/02\/03\/tamar-by-mal-peet\/","title":{"rendered":"“Tamar” by Mal Peet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Guardian Prize- winning author, Mal Peet won the Carnegie Medal for Tamar<\/em> and it\u2019s pretty easy to see why. His YA novel is an epic read, spanning fifty years of history and three generations of a complicated family. It\u2019s a big book but I read it in less than twenty four hours because I simply couldn\u2019t put it down. If you like historical sagas with plenty of action, you\u2019ll absolutely love this book. It focuses on Tamar, a young fifteen year old woman who, after her grandfather\u2019s suicide, attempts to unravel his complex past. Peet then uses flashbacks to 1944 to reveal Tamar\u2019s grandfather\u2019s side of the story and introduce the people and events which shaped his life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It transpires that Tamar\u2019s grandfather was an undercover agent for the allies, operating in the Dutch resistance during the latter part of World War 2. As Tamar discovers more and more about his past, she begins to suspect that he wasn\u2019t the man he purported to be. In normal circumstances she might have asked questions of her grandmother, the women who\u2019d escaped from the Netherlands with her grandfather in 1945. The two of them had spent the remainder of their lives in England, yet never quite managed to shake off the past. However, Tamar\u2019s grandmother has developed Dementia and can\u2019t offer her granddaughter any help in unravelling the fifty year old mystery of who her grandfather really was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll be very honest. There are only a few chapters of Tamar<\/em> which deal explicitly with the grandmother\u2019s Dementia. It\u2019s mostly a kind of historical fiction thriller with a tiny bit of romance thrown in for good measure. It\u2019s a brilliant story, exceptionally well-written and I\u2019m grateful that the inclusion of a Dementia narrative made me pick it up and read it through. The sections which focus on Dementia might be slim but they\u2019re very well-crafted and capture a couple of aspects of the illness I haven\u2019t seen explored in many novels so far. Marijke (the grandmother), is a Dutch speaker who learns English late in life, \u201cher English had never been perfect like Grandad\u2019s. She\u2019d often search for the word for something, clicking her fingers impatiently, then give up and use the Dutch.\u201d As her Dementia develops Marijke loses her English and defaults back to her native Dutch. No one in the care home she lives in understands her. They do, \u201cwhat English people do when they speak to foreigners: talk slowly and loudly in English, and mime.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve not seen this concept of defaulting to a primary language included in any Dementia narrative I\u2019ve read so far, though I\u2019ve witnessed it a few times in community arts practice when working with people living with Dementia who\u2019d spoken Irish or another language before they learnt English. I also noted with interest Marijke\u2019s attempts to hide food from her carers; a throwback to her youth, when she\u2019d hidden food from the Nazi\u2019s who\u2019s overran their neighbourhood. This is another practice I\u2019ve witnessed amidst people living with Dementia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peet\u2019s description of Marijke\u2019s Dementia is uncannily accurate and well-observed. The loving and gentle descriptions of how Tamar\u2019s grandfather enters into his wife\u2019s confusion as a means of reassuring her, are worth the read alone. This is why I\u2019m including Tamar <\/em>in my collection of Dementia narratives. There are only a few chapters featuring the older version of Marijke but they\u2019re substantial enough to make this novel an essential inclusion, not to mention, a fantastic read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tamar was published by Walker Books in 2005 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guardian Prize- winning author, Mal Peet won the Carnegie Medal for Tamar and it\u2019s pretty easy to see why. His YA novel is an epic read, spanning fifty years of history and three generations of a complicated family. It\u2019s a big book but I read it in less than twenty four hours because I simply couldn\u2019t put […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[30,6,66,4,17,14,11],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-english","tag-family","tag-historical-fiction","tag-novels","tag-residential-care-facility","tag-woman","tag-young-adult"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":305,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}