This story within a story deals principally with the Turkish genocide of Armenians more than a century ago and the displacement that ensued.
Debut novelist Saroyan’s story begins in the present day in Istanbul with two former lovers, Armenian-American Mari Alexander and Turkish Selim Bayrak, who reconnect over a startling discovery: the diary of Ani Noroyan. It details her marriage to a master goldsmith and, as danger looms, her sending her 15-year-old son, Paul, on his own to Istanbul in 1895. There, he’s taken in by Taki Economides, a Greek executive chef in the German Embassy. Paul rises rapidly due to his obvious talent at preparing food. During this charmed period, he falls in love and marries the beautiful Vasso, an orphan whom the Economides have also taken in—but from the start, there’s something worrisome about the young woman. Eventually, anti-Armenian terror spreads from the eastern provinces to Istanbul, and Paul and his growing family must flee. A stopover in Marseille, France, is enticing, but America, the promised land, beckons. There, however, they experience one crushing hardship after another. Paul doesn’t speak English, and he’s forced to swallow his justifiable pride and start at the bottom of a new career, working at a textile job. Meanwhile, Vasso sulks; she refuses to learn English and won’t lift a finger to help the family—but she will seek out men to salve her vanity. Saroyan effectively draws on elements of her own Greek and Armenian family’s immigrant experiences while providing details of life in Istanbul—specifically, all the sights, sounds, aromas, rituals, the rambunctious family life in the Economides’ compound. She also depicts all the love that Paul has for Vasso—love that makes the days in America exquisitely painful as Paul begins to crumble under the strain. Along the way, she makes readers realize that although Vasso was troubled from an early age, it was really geopolitical forces beyond their control—that bitter gift of fate—that did her and Paul in.
A powerful novel that’s especially relevant in the current era of Middle Eastern displacement.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979763-18-9
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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