Following Nobody’s Child (2003) and Aram’s Choice (2006), Skrypuch continues the story of the Armenian genocide, this time focusing on the lives of Marta Hovsepian and Kevork Adomian. It’s 1916, and World War I is raging. Two Armenian massacres have occurred, and the two protagonists have survived, for now—Marta by living in a Turkish home as a Muslim woman, Kevork by adoption into an Arab clan in Syria. They are betrothed but separated, neither knowing if the other has survived, always wondering if they will ever be reunited. The carefully structured narrative, with several alternating third-person points-of-view and much revealed through flashbacks, is distancing, but it does yield a sense of the epic; readers will feel that they have been on Kevork’s journey with him, across the deserts and through the concentration camps in his quest to find Marta. The smells of the bazaars and graphic images from death marches and concentration camps root the story in the particulars of time and place. A good match with Adam Bagdasarian’s Forgotten Fire (2002). (map, historical note) (Fiction. 14 & up)
