A finely wrought, chilling tale of terror, slaughter, and hardship and of the courage and endurance of those struggling to...
Armenian Christians in 19th-century Turkey endure discrimination and atrocities at the hands of the government, the Muslim majority, and others in this historical novel.
Inspired by her own Armenian ancestors, debut author Rivers portrays the violence that Armenian Christians faced in their ancestral home in 1895 and ’96. Three narrators in the city of Erzerum in eastern Turkey tell the tale: Martiros, one of four brothers in the prosperous Armenian Kavafian family; his sister-in-law, Marjan; and Hamed, a close neighbor who’s a Muslim and an officer in the Turkish army. After an uprising of Armenian revolutionaries and nationalists in Constantinople, trouble spreads across the country. The government jails Armenians, who also face torture, rape, and murder by soldiers and mobs as they lack the basic rights of their Muslim countrymen. The wave of violence reaches Erzerum with the murder of two impoverished Armenian hay carriers. Later, the government locks up the city’s leading Armenian bishop, and soon, a government-led rampage breaks out, with troops and mobs raping, murdering, and looting. Hundreds of Armenians die and are buried in mass graves. The Kavafians ride out the massacre in a hideaway that Hamed provides them at great peril to his military career, but the oldest Kavafian brother, Sarkis, sneaks out on a secret mission to help resisters and gets killed. After exacting revenge, family members and friends grieve and try to reassemble their broken lives; some elect to leave the country, and Marjan slips into Russia with her family. Rivers weaves a dense, intricate tapestry of the Armenian Christians' lives, set against larger political and social events. The many names of people and places become easier for readers to track thanks to supplemental material, including a brief history, family tree, glossary, and maps. Rivers adeptly evokes the passions and enmities of family relations as the once-comfortable Kavafians try to adjust to their new, nightmarish reality. She also leavens the tale’s tragedy with flashes of wry humor: “A physician makes a lot of friends if he doesn’t kill too many of his patients,” Marjan notes. Although Rivers convincingly details her characters’ personal dilemmas and actions, the government’s political motivations are less clear—but perhaps there’s no explaining state-sponsored madness.
A finely wrought, chilling tale of terror, slaughter, and hardship and of the courage and endurance of those struggling to survive.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4808-1874-3
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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