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The Sandcastle Girls is a book within a book. The overlaying tale is of Laura Petrosian, a middle-aged American novelist who becomes obsessed with learning her grandparents’ story. Interwoven with Laura’s first-person narrative is the text of the book she’s writing: a fictionalized account of her grandparents’ meeting in Aleppo, Syria set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide and during the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Bohjalian will almost certainly have another entry on the bestseller lists with The Sandcastle Girls; the novel will appeal to a wide variety of readers, particularly those who enjoy historical fiction. (Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
Full Review
(1127 words).
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated 
of 5
by Big Bear
A historic thriller with color and mystery
Chris Bohjalian writes with rhythm, changing the tempo with the times of the events he is describing or the content of these events. All this while he describes authentic and well researched horrific events. The prose leaves you glued to the book... Read More
Rated 
of 5
by Anita
Poor writing
I have previously learned about the Armenian holocaust and was anxious to read about it in a novel format. I am certain the the author did much research and based stories of the suffering of the characters in the book on that information. But I... Read More
Rated of 5
by Louise J
Hugely Disappointing...
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... Read More
Rated of 5
by Diane S.
The Sandcastle Girls
This book was incredibly difficult for me to read, and yet without books like these horrific events and the people who survived them would be forgotten. The Armenian genocide of 1915, is not something we learned in school and Bohjalian does a... Read More
Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife
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The word "genocide" was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish legal scholar, although it didn't enter common usage until the Nuremberg trials (the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the Holocaust). The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
