THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS

The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian - This is a fictional love story told against the backdrop of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. It's a good story, but I'm having trouble with it on a number of levels that are causing me to think and rethink about the Ottoman Empire and the Genocide of 1915, as well as the 1922 Catastrophe (turkish slaughter of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna that my grandmother witnessed and survived) and how stories are told. First, there is the matter of a male author posing as a female writer in her first person voice. I think he did it so that he could show more sympathy to the Genocide. He's a very chatty female, but with a male bent, and at one point, the modern day Armenian American narrator tells us that "...Apparently I have fallen more deeply under the sway of what happened to my family than I might have expected to when I first started this story, given the pride I have always taken in my writerly jadedness.)" (p 237) And then there's the problem of the title and book cover which convey something lighthearted or happy. There wasn't a better title for this than The Sandcastle Girls?
If you want to learn about the Armenian Genocide, perhaps this will be your starting point, and perhaps that was the author's intent all along. If so, then know that the story is imaginative and readable, and that you will enjoy the characters.
Genocide is tragic ugly stain on humanity whenever it occurs, and just because almost 100 years have passed since the Armenian Genocide, it is no less wrong than it was at the time it was happening. It's time for the Turkish government to own this part of their history and to teach it in their schools so that it will never happen again. The continued denial is frustrating, sad, dishonest, and hateful. It really did happen.