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Plain Dealer, OH
April 25 2013
Chris Bohjalian's tender love story 'The Sandcastle Girls' told during
gripping Armenian genocide: New in Paperback
By Donna Marchetti, Special to The Plain Dealer
Chris Bohjalian's "The Sandcastle Girls" opens in 1915 when Elizabeth
Endicott, a fresh Mount Holyoke graduate, arrives in Aleppo, Syria, to
help her father with humanitarian relief during the Armenian genocide.
The conditions and atrocities are horrifying. But in the midst of the
misery, she falls in love with Armen, an Armenian engineer who has
lost his wife and child. When Armen joins the British to fight against
the Turks in Gallipoli, they don't know when -- or if -- they will see
each other again.
Flash forward to the present, and Laura Petrosian learns of a
photograph taken during the genocide now in a Harvard museum. It might
be her grandmother. Though her family has been mute about the
genocide, Laura is drawn to unearth the truth about what really
happened -- and her grandparents' part in it. What she finds are
wrenching secrets they have kept from their family -- and from each
other.
It takes some time for Bohjalian to find his footing between the two
plot threads, but once he does, the novel grips, as both a tender love
story and an indictment of ethnic cleansing.
http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2013/04/chris_bohjalians_told_love_sto.html
April 25 2013
Chris Bohjalian's tender love story 'The Sandcastle Girls' told during
gripping Armenian genocide: New in Paperback
By Donna Marchetti, Special to The Plain Dealer
Chris Bohjalian's "The Sandcastle Girls" opens in 1915 when Elizabeth
Endicott, a fresh Mount Holyoke graduate, arrives in Aleppo, Syria, to
help her father with humanitarian relief during the Armenian genocide.
The conditions and atrocities are horrifying. But in the midst of the
misery, she falls in love with Armen, an Armenian engineer who has
lost his wife and child. When Armen joins the British to fight against
the Turks in Gallipoli, they don't know when -- or if -- they will see
each other again.
Flash forward to the present, and Laura Petrosian learns of a
photograph taken during the genocide now in a Harvard museum. It might
be her grandmother. Though her family has been mute about the
genocide, Laura is drawn to unearth the truth about what really
happened -- and her grandparents' part in it. What she finds are
wrenching secrets they have kept from their family -- and from each
other.
It takes some time for Bohjalian to find his footing between the two
plot threads, but once he does, the novel grips, as both a tender love
story and an indictment of ethnic cleansing.
http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2013/04/chris_bohjalians_told_love_sto.html