Nobody's Child

Lisa Arsenault is an elementary-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

The deportation of the Armenian population from Turkey in the early 20th
century is the subject of this historical novel for adolescents. It
traces the lives of three siblings, orphaned by state-sanctioned attacks
on their minority people, who grow up in an orphanage run by Europeans.
Ultimately, they are deported, split up, and forced into humiliating and
degrading circumstances. Despite the horrendous things that happen to
them, the children forge strong bonds with others in like circumstances
and create small pockets of normalcy in their lives. Amid atrocity, a
doomed romance develops.

One of the positive aspects of this book is that it resists the
temptation to paint all Turks as monsters. On more than one occasion,
the characters are aided by Muslims. However, it is difficult to gloss
over the culpability of the Turkish government, which sanctioned
genocide, and the book makes this culpability clear.

The novel does a good job of recounting events and describing the
heinous acts perpetrated against the Armenians, but there is a curious
detachment in the writing style. The dialogue is very simplistic and
often stilted. Even close family members speak to each other in an
unconvincing, formal fashion, which tends to minimize the emotional
impact of their words. The result is to distance the reader from the
protagonists, thereby limiting our empathy. The narrative style is also
very simplistic and certain phrases are repeated several times,
indicating a paucity of vocabulary.

Certainly, we should know about the Armenian holocaust, but the writing
in this case does not do justice to the topic. Not a first-choice
purchase.