The Sandcastle Girls

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.

It turned out to be the horrors of the events chronicled in this novel that ended up having the most impact on me, and not the characters through whose eyes Bohjalian tells this story of a part of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and onward by the Ottoman rulers and the "young Turks" -- a genocide that it's still impossible to discuss in today's Turkey, where denial is the rule.Bohjalian is to be commended for taking on the task of trying to make the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the desert wastes of Turkey and Syria as vivid in our imaginations as is the Holocaust. But while there have been so many great novels set against the background of the Holocaust, this isn't a great novel, merely an adequate and rather predictable one. We know from the first pages that the narrator's Armenian grandfather and Boston-born grandmother meet in Aleppo (modern-day Syria) at the height of the massacre, and end up building a life together; the only question becomes how that happens. Somehow, Armen must survive the genocide and Gallipoli -- but obviously that happens, so there's less suspense. Obviously, Elizabeth in her turn makes it out of Aleppo, and any barriers to their love prove surmountable.There are horrors here -- very vividly depicted, in sometimes nauseating detail. But without the sense of our primary characters -- Armen, Elizabeth or Laura, the present narrator -- having their lives at stake or their sense of selves deeply threatened -- it is too often a less engaging narrative than the nature of the story demands. Perhaps had Bohjalian chosen not to blend Laura's quest for the truth of her grandparent's experiences with the main story set in 1915, I would have found myself as caught up in Bohjalian's fictional story as I was with the historical facts? And perhaps this is a better novel for someone to read who isn't at all familiar with the history. I had been lucky enough to read another novel about 18 months ago,  Erevan  by Gilbert Sinoue, which has yet to be translated into English, that was a much better novel with a much less obvious plot, and that may have affected my response to this book. The only analogy that I can think of is that it felt like watching  Schindler's List DVD (Universal's 100th Anniversary) , a moving Hollywood chronicle of the Holocaust, rather than  The Grey Zone  or  Good , two far more chilling but also more bleak Holocaust films.I wished that Bohjalian had been able to craft characters that measured up to the kinds of events against which he set his novel. Laura tells the reader her quest for the truth is unsettling and that she is driven -- but she came across to me as little more than a notch above mildly curious and there's no sense her identity is shaken by her discoveries. Elizabeth's character doesn't really change throughout -- she starts as an independent-minded woman intent on cutting her own path, and ends up that way. Other characters are there to serve the author's purpose, and never really become three-dimensional.This is obviously a deeply personal narrative by Bohjalian; I've found in other cases that an author's desire to tell a story can sometimes interfere too much or become too obvious in the novel that emerges. It's a reasonably good story, albeit rather predictable, about some truly extraordinary, important and horrifyingly overlooked historical events, but it's the latter that gave this novel any emotional heft that it had for me, rather than the characters themselves. When I was riveted by it, it wasn't by what Bohjalian brought to the book but by the events.By all means, read this; indeed, you should. Especially if you've read novels set against the backdrop of the Holocaust but are only vaguely familiar with the Armenian genocide from occasional references in the papers. I hope that it also turns out to be a compelling fictional world in which you find yourself while you are reading; I wish it had been my experience. 3.5 stars, rounded up because of the importance of the events themselves.

This review is for the unabridged audio version by Random House Audio in 9 CDs , Cassandra Campbell and Alison Fraser are the two readers and they do a great job not only with interpreting the mood of the novel, but also in doing different accents ….it is fortunate they had the common sense to choose different voices, this helps to distinguish between the first person narration of Laura Petrosian And the historical description of the Armenian massacre that started in 1915together with other situations.Laura is the grandaughter of an Armenian engineer who would later become a soldier with the British army and a Bostonian mother Elizabeth … she starts by describing her grandmother arrival in Aleppo in Syria where she starts witnessing the arrival of half dead Armenian refugees….I do not want to spoil the rest of the book, I only say that the two met and fell in love. If you consider this a spoiler, look away now.Perhaps it is only me but I would have given it five stars if it wasn’t for certain parts of Laura’s narration of her own life, in my opinion she is at times insufferable, for example in Chapter 11 (CD 6) her telling of her brother having his first erection while watching their aunt’s belly dancing is not only inappropriate and irrelevant to the story but is also one of the most vain and unnecessary digression especially in parallel with the tragedy of war. I would have expected discretion, a bit more tact and respect from her part …. Also towards the beginning of the novel when she describes her ‘relationship’ with her first Turkish boyfriend, there are some details that as a reader I can do better without, more precisely I would have enjoyed the story more if it wasn’t for certain details … for me the historical narration of one of the greatest human tragedies is irreconcilable with certain parts of Laura’s narration.Please note that there are swearing words.The audio version also contains an afterword and an interview with the author, again I do not want to spoil the content, I only say that I was left with the feeling that he could have said more … I would say the interview was only partially revealing ….

An interesting story about a forgotten genocide. Setting very well realised, characters engaging. Plot contrived. A good holiday read.

This book was so different from anything I had read previously by this author. Nevertheless I liked it enough to finish it.

A deeply disturbing book about a very forgotten past. Well worth reading even if some of the content is "troubling"

this was a compelling story, about a subject i knew nothing about. The author brought the characters and story to life.