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Mal Peet was a delight to read and meet. I can’t describe him as a YA author because he would loathe that description, refusing to see his writing pigeonholed into age categories. But clearly both young adults and adults appreciated his novels, and children his picture books. He has left a legacy of memorable books […]

By Abby Gross

I read science and social science manuscripts for work, so in my off time I like to read other genres, from fiction and fantasy to cookbooks. Here were some of my favorite reads of the year.

I hadn’t read a young adult novel in years, and the jacket description of this book was enough to send me running in the opposite direction. But ignore the copy about the teenager struggling with cancer and her friend whom she meets in a support group. John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars is a magnificent and hilarious book about two young people who game the make-a-wish foundation to pursue a meeting with their favorite author, only to find out he is a crazy drunk.

After finishing the works of MFK Fisher, the godmother of writing about cooking, I was despondent — until I found Tamar Adler, whose new book, An Everlasting Meal, channels Fisher’s practical, no-nonsense style and wisdom. If you are like me, and you prefer to cook freestyle, without intricate recipes, this book will surprise you with ideas for using up the last bits of whatever you have on hand. More importantly, it teaches the reader — Adler is a natural instructor — about how to weave cooking into life without assuming that you have tons of cash or free time.

I wish I could go back in time to my 18-year-old self, bored in Biology 101, and hand over a copy of Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature, by David Barash. (Disclosure: I helped OUP publish this book.) Barash addresses brow-furrowing questions like “why do humans create religion?” and “why do women menstruate?” He swiftly reasons through the possible arguments (with jokes, which helps non-scientists through the science) eventually leaving the questions unanswered, but the reader equipped to think more intelligently about why we are what we are and why we do what we do.

Abby Gross is a Medical editor at Oxford University Press.

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The post Abby Gross’s top books of 2012 appeared first on OUPblog.

Usually when I write a review of a crossover book, I'm reviewing an adult book I think children ages twelve and up will like. This time, however, I am reviewing a book marketed to teens that adults will appreciate--Tamar, by Mal Peet. (Tamar won the 2005 Carnegie in the U.K.)

To be honest, I am not sure why Tamar is a Young Adult novel. Some sections of the book are narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl, but the vast majority of passages concern adult resistance workers in World War II. To miss Tamar, subtitled A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal, because it's located in the Young Adult section is a betrayal, indeed.

Tamar opens with a conversation between a father--William Hyde--and his adult son. The son's wife is expecting and the father has an usual request: If the child is a girl, will his son please name her Tamar? The father gives no reasons for the request, but the son likes the name and agrees.

The reader then travels back in time to when the father (and soon-to-be-grandfather) is working for the British Secret Service with the Dutch Resistance in a small town in the Netherlands. He is one of two men working under assumed names: Tamar, the resistance organizer, or Dart, his code transmitter. Both men love the same woman, Marijke, whose house serves as a base for the young resistance workers, but only Tamar has a relationship with her.* Two men in love with the same woman, fear, starvation, and a rogue resistance worker, who rebels in spectacular fashion against Tamar's command, lead to ultimate betrayal and loss for World War II-era Tamar, Dart, and Marijke.

Interspersed with accounts of Tamar, Marijke, and Dart's lives in Nazi-occupied Netherlands are passages in which modern-day Tamar, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of "William Hyde," tries to understand why her grandfather committed suicide just months before, when already an old man. He leaves her a box of clues--clues that will lead to the truth about his past.

Tamar is a detective story and a meditation on the meaning of truth. It's a great novel for children, sure, but it's also an important story for adult readers as well. And, good news: A little research tells me the paperback edition is out in the U.S. on September 9.
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* Yes, Tamar is biologically young Tamar's grandfather. The question is, who was William Hyde, the grandfather Tamar knew and loved in 1990s England.