The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bojhalian
My 2 cents:
The Sandcastle Girls by
Chris Bohjalian is a book like no other I've read. The author plunks
us down squarely in the sweltering heat and sun of 1915 Aleppo,
capital of Syria. Through Laura's eyes, a young, blue-eyed,
red-haired college graduate from Boston, we see hundreds of Armenian
women and childen “march” into Aleppo seeking refuge, many
finding death instead.
Don't be embarrassed if you're
scratching your head. Listen to Laura on p.6:
“1915 is the year of the Slaughter
You Know Next To Nothing About. If you are not Armenian, you probably
know little about the deportations and the massacres: the death of a
million and a half civilians. Meds Yeghern. The Great Catastrophe.
It's not taught much in school, and it's not the sort of thing most
of us read before going to bed.”
Laura's right about that. The
Sandcastle Girls isn't exactly a bedtime story, either.
The pages describing atrocities inflicted on the Armenians by the
Turks are so graphic, I couldn't read them. I simply had to skip over
those parts, and even then, while I was turning the page, I caught
glimpses of words like, “heads rolling,” “decapitations,”
“outrages” (rapes), children being lashed on the heels, a pencil
jabbed in a Turkish soldier's eye, children being left in caves to
smother to death, white bones stacked high to the sky, and, well, you
get the picture.
So that's war, and The
Sandcastle Girls is a book about war. About war, and so
much more. It's a novel of unforgettable characters: Laura Endicott;
her father, Silas Endicott; Armen, the young Armenian engineer Laura
meets, who's fought his way to Aleppo to search for his wife and baby
daughter; Nevart, a doctor's wife whose husband was killed in the
genocide; and Hatoun, the orphaned child Nevart strives to save.
Armen climbs with Laura one day to the
top of the Citadel, an ancient castle in ruins in Aleppo. As Laura
picks her way through the clumps of rubble, she imagines the palace
as it once was with “tiles of turquoise and titian and cobalt
blue.”
“Once more she was unprepared for
such beauty in the midst of such pain.” (p. 35)
In that sentence is the theme of
Bohjalian's remarkable novel. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to
shut down my laptop, and read The Sandcastle Girls again.
With tissue.
Length: 293 pages
Worth Your Time? Yes. But, because of
the war atrocities, it's for an audience of mature high schoolers and
older. This book is classified Adult Fiction, not Young Adult
Literature.
Thanks for throwing this one into the mix. I'm interested in books that explore the strength of the human spirit in times of war. We are fortunate in America, but also often lacking in appreciation for the relatively peaceful existence we've known on our own soil over the last 140+ years or so. Sometimes when humanity is stripped down to the bare essentials of survival, it comes to know itself most genuinely and rise to its highest potential. Its important for us to look to the experiences of other cultures to teach us what we sometimes forget.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! I'm glad I had the opportunity to read Bohjalian's newest book. I want to read it again, because I feel like there is so much there, that I didn't catch everything the first time. You are right about "the bare essentials of survival." Thanks for your insightful comments!
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