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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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