NEVER HIDE FROM THE DEVIL

It’s April 1915 and war has come—not with a bang but with a whimper, and nothing will ever be as it was.

This slowly unfurling epic dramatizes the defense of the city of Van—a bitter victory in the first month of the Armenian genocide—through the eyes of 14-year-old Suren Simonian, an ordinary teenager straining against the last vestiges of childhood and forced to grow up too quickly. Rumors of horrific abuses against Armenians soon become a bloody reality. As much at war with himself as with the Turks who seek to exterminate his people, Suren is in turn bolstered and chained by family, faith, and friends. He’s determined to do his part to protect his home. A self-described odar, or foreigner, McQueen approaches this story with extraordinary sensitivity and lyricism. He adeptly maintains tension throughout; lighter or more introspective moments feel like pauses for breath, balancing out the bloodshed. The story’s true strength lies in its heartfelt narration: Suren’s anxious thoughts, his musings on the nature of friendship, evil, and religion, and his endless questions express the fear, frustration, anger, hope, and confused grief of a young person whose world has lost all rhyme or reason. The characters reveal their depths through their actions, words, and feelings, and readers will feel for them as though they were their own neighbors, in peril of their lives.

Heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, and painfully timely.