I wasn't going to read this book, but I just had not choice! My conscience wouldn't allow me to skip over reading this potential book! It even ended up on Oprah's book of the week list!
This is a book about a young American woman from Boston goes with her father to the Ottoman Empire to help assist the Armenians who were deported to Syria in the Ottoman Empire in an organization that helps and tries to save Armenians. They want to find out where the Armenians that were moved to their area by the Turkish soldiers were moved to. Where the Armenians were moved to is kind of obvious if you know about the Armenian Holocaust enough.
Elisabeth falls in love with an Armenian who escaped being murdered by the Turkish gov, who also lost his wife, and his child died. She makes all kinds of friends too, besides the organization director, she befriends an Armenian woman who is widowed but is also very smart! She befriends a little Armenian girl who lost her sister and mother to the Turks. She also has a Turkish doctor for a friend who helps her learn Turkish and teaches her the foundations of Islam of how it should be taught! She also befriends two Germans who photographed the Armenians in their area to hopefully show the world how horrible they were being treated by the Turks (possibly a satire off of Armin Wegner).
Flash-forwarded to the present, Laura an American woman who is of Armenian descent and Elisabeth's granddaughter looks into her almost forgotten and not talked about much past. It concerns mainly of how her grandparents met, how her relationship with a Turkish boy when she was a teenager affected her, and how she ended up becoming interested in the Armenian Holocaust.
It also has a good twist at the end!
Here are the conclusions I drawn from the book:
-This is a good book, it's a good example as to why the US shouldn't sweep what happened to the Armenians under the rug. In fact, what the author might have forgotten to mention was that Hitler knew about the Armenian Holocaust, and used it as a way to murder the Jews, Slavics and everyone else. The man who came up with the term genocide was not only a Jew, but he used the Armenian Genocide as a poster child of what a genocide was besides the Holocaust against the Jews. We just can't afford to sweep this genocide under the rug, too many Christians in Muslim ruled countries are still being targeted for extermination because they refuse to learn from this history!
-There is also war in this book, and while WW1 was almost 100 years ago, we can't sweep this under the rug either. It seems to me that WW1 is the war that nobody wants to talk about, you hear them talk about WW2 and the Jewish Holocaust a lot more in the media. To sweep what happened to our soldiers and others under the rug compared to WW2 just because less people died in WW1 than WW2, it's a form of disrespect for all the solders of WW1 who died and served all the countries they were serving when WW1 happened! You have to remember that this war at the time was serious because everyone thought that this war was going to end soon, but then a bunch of chain reactions turned it into a World War and the largest amount of casualties for the time made people want to forget about it and sweep it under the rug. We need to appreciate our WW1 solders around the world too!
-It's another example of how the humane principles of Islam were turned into a weapon for the Young Turks to persecute and murder their Christian population. We need to teach our children that putting Islam in a government is not the same as following the actual principles of Islam. This is a common thing that humans are capable of doing, if many Christian rulers could desecrate the humane foundations of Christianity then Muslims who put religion in the government aren't spared. In fact, nobody is spared.
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| Now an acclaimed HBO Max series starring Kaley Cuoco and Rosie Perez, a powerful story about the ways an entire life can change in one night: a flight attendant wakes up in the wrong hotel, in the wrong bed, with a dead man—and no idea what happened. | "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A young Puritan woman—faithful, resourceful, but afraid of the demons that dog her soul—plots her escape from a violent marriage in this riveting and propulsive novel of historical suspense." | NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A twisting story of love and deceit: an American man vanishes on a rural road in Vietnam, and his girlfriend follows a path that leads her home to the very hospital where they met. | NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A sweeping historical love story that probes the depths of love, family, and secrets in Armenia during WWI. | A luxurious African safari turns deadly for a Hollywood starlet and her entourage in this riveting historical thriller. | This modern classic explores questions of human responsibility that are as fundamental to our society now as they were when the book was first published. A selection of Oprah's original Book Club that has sold more than two million copies. |
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a valley of bones
The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian‘In Aleppo Nevart wanders among the stalls in the market, some empty and some with only a few bags of half-empty crates of rotting oranges or putrid meat.”Could well be Aleppo in 2016, but it is Aleppo one hundred years ago during de last years of the Turkish/ Ottoman empire and the genocide against the Armenian citizens of that empire.This novel shows us that tragedy in all its horrors, as only literature can. At his best moments the author shows us the extremes of war and completely senseless killing in a Homer like way. As in his last moments the thoughts of a dying soldier go out to his ‘enemies’ many of them bound to meet there own death soon. ‘Those poor basters (…) they’re about to get themselves killed too.’I was in Armenia this spring (May/ June 2016) visited the genocide memorial in Yerevan, was not planning on doing so but for many people in Armenia this part of their history was so important and so alive that they convinced me to go there. (some of my photo’s you can see on my google+ page Yerevan … a sparkling, poetical and romantic hymn … [...]Chris Bohjalian sees a connection between the genocide against the Armenians, Jews, the killing fields in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur … Syria today(?) and probably many more. Perhaps that connection is the human stain we can’t seem to get rid off.Bohjalian composes and documenters’ his story very thoroughly. A family history over several generation, showing us the tragedy and its long after mate from different angels from extreme repulsive to daily casual. Of course there is a family secret to reveal, but it is in his words that Bohjalian truly gives his characters depth and brings them alive in our minds as well as in our hearts.Somewhere in the novel one of the characters recites Ezekiel 37:1“The hand of the Lord was on me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the middle of the valley which was full of bones”In this biblical vision, the dry bones aptly represent the ruined and desperate state of both Israel and Judah. In the novel the valley of bones is the killing of the Armenian population of the Ottoman empire. As today Aleppo and the whole of Syria are again turned into a valley full of bones, making the history of senseless killing a little longer and our human stain a little darker.On page 149 Elizabeth quotes by heart from the Quran, at the scene were Turkish soldiers plan to steal the aid meant for the Armenian refugees; ‘Allah has full knowledge and is well acquainted with all things’ after that the soldiers choose to steal only half of the aid goods. The full text of surah 49:13 goes like this:O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise (each other). Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of God is (he who is) the most righteous of you. And God has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things). Making me wonder how many of today’s fundamentalists actually know their ‘own’ Quran.Perhaps Allah has the full knowledge, writer en reader should not want to have.The witnessing of the reuniting between Armin and Elizabeth by Karine (Armin’s supposed death wife), is not dramatic anymore but is theatrical, and got me completely out of the story. Until that point I was unravelling the family history through the eyes of Laura. It seems a totally unnecessary action, scene, confrontation, it blow me of my feet, most surely but in a seemingly totally unnecessary way.It leads to Karine’s suicide and finally her death (at last), ‘but wasn’t she death already’, are not only the words in her mind but also her question to the author. Why bring me back to life when everybody knows already that I am death, only to let me die again in even far more worse circumstances than the first time, for what other reason than high drama. This is a Greek tragedy too great for this realistic novel.About the title ‘The Sandcastle girls’Finding his way back to Aleppo through the Sinai desert Armen has a mirage. A group of women and children building a sandcastle, among them his wife and child. The mirage saves his life and helps him find his way to Aleppo. At the same time (?) his lover, Elizabeth, is building a sandcastle with Hatoun, one of her pupils. ‘Really, nothing ever lasts’ except for in our minds there even a sandcastle can save us.He who does not travel does not know the value of a man, is an old Moorish proverb cited on page 222 and meaning something like: When you don't expose yourself to the rest of the world by visiting different parts of the world, you become narrow-minded and think of people as one mould. You haven't met every kind of person. You don't know what people are capable of. You're not aware of other people's cultures and beliefs if you don't expose yourself to another way of life.Making me realise ones again why I appreciate traveling so much and consider it much more than just another holiday.So please read this book, next to the tragedy of the Arminian genocide there is a lot more to learn there.
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the Sandcastle girls
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2016