#orhan's inheritance

[callmewinged]

All of life, Orhan realizes, is a story within a story; how we choose to listen and which words we choose to speak makes all the difference.

Aline Ohanesian

[famousfirstsentences]

They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky.

Orhan’s Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian

[andisbookshelf]

Book Reivew: Orhan’s Inhertiance

Orhan’s Inhertiance Aline Ohanesian

I specifically chose to read 'Orhan's Inheritance' to learn more about a time and a place I know little about. It was a good choice. It's a solid 4-star book in my opinion. The thing that kept me from giving it a full 5-star rating was a lack of complete connection with the characters and the story. Perhaps the reason is that the story was told from multiple perspectives. [I had a similar feeling with another book I read recently that was told through multiple narrators, 'Inside the O'Briens' by Lisa Genova.] But, whatever the reason, I didn't find myself as much invested in the characters as curious about them and how their lives were interwoven. I wanted to know how things fit together more than I fell deeply into the narrative, which was disappointing. It was interesting to have the story told from dual, opposing perspectives, however. Even when I have an opinion about something, I find it helpful and even necessary to consider that something from multiple perspectives to help me understand it and reexamine my opinion to confirm it was formed on solid ground. Nothing in this book makes me see what happened to the Armenians (and other similar groups in the Ottoman Empire) in 1915 as anything but genocide. I didn't honestly think it would, having been written by the descendant of an Armenian survivor, but it was appreciated that the Turkish perspective was included.

[nprbooks]

Aline Ohanesian says her new novel was inspired by a story her grandmother told her about her horrific experiences after Armenians were forced out of their homes by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Her grandmother never talked about it to anyone else in the family — and in fact never spoke about it again.

Many years later, as a mother of two and a graduate student in history, she started hearing her grandmother's voice -- and those thoughts became the beginning of the novel.

'Orhan's Inheritance' Is The Weight Of History

Top image: (Emily Jan/NPR) 

Bottom image:  A news photograph from 1915 shows Armenian orphans deported from Turkey. (APIC/Getty Images)

[libraryjournal]

Writing To Remember: A 20th-Century Tragedy Inspires a Debut Novel

April 15 is not only Holocaust Remembrance Day but it also marks the centennial of the deportation and killings over a million Christian Armenians by a collapsing Ottoman Empire, an act that Pope Francis has called the first genocide of the 20th century. Writer  Aline Ohanesian explains what inspired her to write about this tragedy in her moving debut novel, Orhan's Inheritance.