Strong renderings of Armenia’s national nightmare, though the narrator’s quest for meaning ultimately disappoints.
A historical novel of ethnic cleansing in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, told by a young boy burdened by his memories.
Constantinople in 1915 was no place to be Armenian. But neither 12-year-old Aran Pirian nor his younger sister, Anahid, could fathom what awaited their people or their family as the Great War engulfed the empire and a genocide agenda took hold among nationalistic Young Turks. When Aran’s father, Hovan, a science professor, is taken by Ottoman soldiers in the middle of the night, Aran’s world is thrown into eclipse. Fleeing the first wave of ethnic deportations with the aid of Hovan’s sympathetic Turkish colleagues, the family’s exodus begins with a period of hiding that’s reminiscent of Anne Frank’s. Small morsels of hope and the kindness of strangers become Aran and Anahid’s daily succor, along with an old trunk containing precious belongings—Aran’s sketch pads, a book of poems, his sister’s beloved violin. Will these be enough to endure a final escape from the city, an extermination camp and desert wanderings among a caravan of starving refugees at the mercy of Ottoman troops? Not everyone will survive. Withdrawing, orphaned Aran attaches himself to others out of necessity but with a hollow heart, which he convincingly explores in interior lamentations. “It was better not to know whom I was devouring,” he confesses. The book’s dialogue rings less true, cluttered as it is with repetitive questions posed by Anahid and by Aran’s fellow refugee, Grace, both of whom feel more like muses than real girls. Trenchant scenes in a detention camp and a death in the desert keep the narrative crisp and suspenseful in the book’s first half. Unfortunately, the drama begins to flag as Aran finds his way to a new world where Armenia becomes little more than a memory. Readers may feel cheated that such a harrowed history can fade as quickly as a song, even if surviving sometimes means forgetting.
Strong renderings of Armenia’s national nightmare, though the narrator’s quest for meaning ultimately disappoints.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477642214
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
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. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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