Melissa Crytzer Fry's Reviews > The Sandcastle Girls

What a heartbreaking, but moving story. I’m always appalled at how incomplete (and one-sided) “history” seems to be – or at least the history that is taught in schools. Historical fiction books like this, I believe, would do wonders for generating interest in history! In The Sandcastle Girls, Chris Bohjalian has illuminated one of the world’s dirtiest secrets: the Armenian genocide.

Told in multiple points of views – by American volunteers, Germans, Turks, Armenian refugees, present-day ancestors of refugees – the story bears witness to the horrific cruelty and murderous scenes of the Armenian genocide (warning: some of the scenes are very descriptive and difficult to read). But layered within that darkness is also hope intertwined with multiple love stories - between man and woman, mothers and daughters, and family.

I waffled on my rating - between a 3.5 and 4 – simply because I felt a disconnect with the present-day narrator, a NY-based granddaughter of a refugee survivor. For me, her curtness and frequent “asides” felt almost flippant when placed next to the heartbreaking narrative of the genocide portions of the story (which were SO well done). And while I didn’t necessarily agree with a plot point at the end of the novel and questioned the motivations of one character in particular (which I won’t reveal, as it is a spoiler to be sure), the beautiful prose of this book and the story itself carried me along at quite a clip. This is a novel I won’t soon forget.