by Mark Kadian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 2012
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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2021
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
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The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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