The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

August 2, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Vintage, 2013. Originally published 2012. 299 pgs. Purchased. In 1915, Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Aleppo, Syria to help deliver food and medical aid to Armenian refugees. Women and children reach the city center in horrific condition, having been force marched across the desert without adequate food and water. Their husbands, fathers, and adult sons were accused of being traitors to the Ottoman Empire and killed in what would come to be known as the Armenian Genocide. Only […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Fiction, Genocide, Middle East • Tags: Chris Bohjalian

The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

July 12, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Cady McClain and Grace Experience. Random House Audio, 2017. 9 hours, 38 minutes. Library copy.  When Lianna Ahlberg awakens one morning at her parents’ home in Vermont and realizes her mother, Annalee, is missing, she immediately feels the worst because Annalee is a sleepwalker whose affliction causes her to wander out of the house and into dangerous situations. Once, Annalee sleepwalked right on to the ledge of the bridge over Gale River, requiring Lianna to pull […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Audiobook, Book Club, Crime, Fiction, New England, North America, United States • Tags: Cady McClain, Chris Bohjalian, Grace Experience

The Buffalo Solider by Chris Bohjalian

March 14, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Vintage, 2003. Originally published 2002.432 pgs. Purchased. Bohjalian’s 2002 novel is the third of his I’ve read and the only one not available through the library. Luckily, I was able to find a copy of this particular novel at a local charity shop and decided to make it the first book I read during spring break. It’s the story of a couple living in northern Vermont trying to deal with the death of their nine-year-old twin daughters. […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Fiction, North America, United States • Tags: Chris Bohjalian

Midwives by Chris Bohjalian

August 26, 2010 by Christina

Fiction — print. Vintage Books, 1997. 372 pgs. Purchased. An Oprah’s Book Club pick, Midwives is the second Bohjalian novel I’ve read; I had previously read Skeletons at the Feast, which was published in 2008. The story is told from the point of view of a thirty-year-old woman telling the tale of what happened the fall and winter of her fourteenth year. Her mother Sibyl Danforth, a midwife, takes desperate measures to save a baby’s life during an icy winter […]

Categories: 2010 Reads, Fiction, New England, North America, United States • Tags: Chris Bohjalian

Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

March 25, 2009 by Christina

Fiction — print. Shaye Areheart, 2008. 372 pgs. Library copy. In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines. Among the group is eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. There is her lover, Callum Finella, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of […]

Categories: 2009 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Genocide, Germany, Holocaust, Poland • Tags: Chris Bohjalian