I read a review of this book quite some time ago and it went on my list. Then a couple of weeks ago I saw it on the buy 2 get 1 free table (I'm a sucker for this table, LOVE IT) at Barnes & Noble, remembered it was on my to read list and picked it up to read the back cover. Main character went to Mount Holyoke, SOLD!!!
I picked it up from my pile this week and the timing was fortuitous. The book takes place at the start of WWI and this week is the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the war.
Elizabeth heads to Syria with nothing but her Mount Holyoke degree, some light nursing training and good intentions. She witnesses some of the horrors of the genocide of Armenians. She learns to stand on her own two feet, and she falls in love.
But this isn't some cheesy love story with war as its setting. The story goes back and forth between modern times to 1915. Elizabeth's granddaughter is the narrator and she tells her grandparents story and the story of the Armenian people. She doesn't learn the story of how her grandparents met and fell in love and what the war did to them and others until they were long gone.
The story is told in the form of threads from different prespectives in the past and present and come together in the end in a way that felt satisfying and natural.
I'l admit I didn't know anything about this genocide and it is heartbreaking. While this story is fiction what happened to the Armenians is not. What is told here contains fictional characters but what they witness and experience is not. At times it is quite brutally described. The history lesson, interesting story telling style and the really well told tale make it worth the read.
(finished August 5, 2014)
