Story Description:
Knopf Doubleday|July 17,
2012|Hardcover|ISBN: 978-0-385-53479-6
Over the course of his career, New York
Times bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian has taken readers on a spectacular
array of journeys. Midwives brought us to an isolated Vermont farmhouse on an icy
winter’s night and a home birth gone tragically wrong. The
Double Bind perfectly conjured the Roaring Twenties on Long Island – and a
young social worker’s descent into madness.
And Skeletons at the Feast chronicled
the last six months of World War Two in Poland and Germany with nail-biting
authenticity. As the Washington Post
Book World has noted, Bohjalian writes “the sorts of books people stay awake
all night to finish.”
In his fifteenth book, The Sandcastle Girls, brings us on a very different kind of
journey. This spellbinding tale travels
between Aleppo, Syria, in 1915 and Bronxville, New York, in 2012 – a sweeping
historical love story steeped in the author’s Armenian heritage, making it his
most personal novel to date.
When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria,
she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and
only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is spreading across
Europe, and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of
Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian
genocide. There, Elizabeth becomes
friendly with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife
and infant daughter. When Armen leaves
Aleppo to join the British Army in Egypt, he begins to write Elizabeth letters,
and comes to realize that he has fallen in love with the wealthy, young
American woman who is so different from the wife he lost. Flash forward to the present, where we meet
Laura Petrosian, a novelist living in suburban New York. Although her grandparents’ ornate Pelham home
was affectionately nicknamed the “Ottoman Annex”, Laura has never really given
her Armenian heritage much thought. But
when an old friend calls, claiming to have seen a newspaper photo of Laura’s
grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum, Laura embarks on a journey
back through her family’s history that reveals love, loss – and a wrenching
secret that has been buried for generations.
My Review:
The
Sandcastle Girls is a love story between, Elizabeth
Endicott, a wealthy Bostonian and a young Armenian engineer named, Armen. This love story takes place during the
Armenian genocide in 1915- 1916 but the entire storyline reverts backs and
forth between the past and the present.
I found the book a bit drab and didn’t
enjoy the writing alternating between past and present tense. I honestly cannot say that I will be
recommending The Sandcastle Girls to
anyone soon as I won’t be. This novel
was a huge disappointment to me considering the strength of and enjoyment in
Bohjalian’s previous fourteen novels.
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