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Kirkus Reviews
January 1, 2013, Tuesday
ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS
SECTION: FICTION
One more account of the four-year occupation of Paris in World War II,
this time seen through the eyes of an Armenian teenager morphing from
clever child to heart-torn woman. The normal events of daily
life-studying for exams, meeting friends-are
One more account of the four-year occupation of Paris in World War II,
this time seen through the eyes of an Armenian teenager morphing from
clever child to heart-torn woman. The normal events of daily
life--studying for exams, meeting friends--are interleaved with loss
and despair in the latest from Kricorian (Dreams of Bread and Fire,
2003, etc.), set in France in the 1940s, where the invading German
troops' arrival heralds a descent into hunger and peril. Maral
Pegorian's family is Armenian and has survived its own history of
massacres and deportations before settling in a Parisian suburb. Now
they watch anxiously, and intervene to save a child, as Jewish
neighbors and schoolmates are rounded up and taken away. While her
brother Missak gets involved in Resistance work, Maral falls in love
with his best friend, Zaven. Forced underground, Zaven and his brother
are eventually arrested by the Germans and sent to a concentration
camp. After the liberation, only one brother returns, but the
consequent trauma and somberness give way to freer, happier emotions
as the war years fade. More chronicle than plotted narrative, this is
conventional, moderate fare, although Kricorian's intermittently
graceful prose can sometimes distract from the predictability and
romantic soupiness
Publication Date: 2013-03-12
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Stage: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-547-93994-0
Price: $24.00
Author: Kricorian, Nancy
January 1, 2013, Tuesday
ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS
SECTION: FICTION
One more account of the four-year occupation of Paris in World War II,
this time seen through the eyes of an Armenian teenager morphing from
clever child to heart-torn woman. The normal events of daily
life-studying for exams, meeting friends-are
One more account of the four-year occupation of Paris in World War II,
this time seen through the eyes of an Armenian teenager morphing from
clever child to heart-torn woman. The normal events of daily
life--studying for exams, meeting friends--are interleaved with loss
and despair in the latest from Kricorian (Dreams of Bread and Fire,
2003, etc.), set in France in the 1940s, where the invading German
troops' arrival heralds a descent into hunger and peril. Maral
Pegorian's family is Armenian and has survived its own history of
massacres and deportations before settling in a Parisian suburb. Now
they watch anxiously, and intervene to save a child, as Jewish
neighbors and schoolmates are rounded up and taken away. While her
brother Missak gets involved in Resistance work, Maral falls in love
with his best friend, Zaven. Forced underground, Zaven and his brother
are eventually arrested by the Germans and sent to a concentration
camp. After the liberation, only one brother returns, but the
consequent trauma and somberness give way to freer, happier emotions
as the war years fade. More chronicle than plotted narrative, this is
conventional, moderate fare, although Kricorian's intermittently
graceful prose can sometimes distract from the predictability and
romantic soupiness
Publication Date: 2013-03-12
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Stage: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-547-93994-0
Price: $24.00
Author: Kricorian, Nancy