Daughter of War.

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Though Daughter of War works well as a stand alone read, this work of historical fiction, which begins in April 1916 and concludes some two years later, continues the little known story of the Armenian Genocide that Skrypuch introduced in The Hunger (1999) and continued in Nobody’s Child (2003). While characters from the earlier works reappear, Daughter of War’s plot focuses on two in-love Armenian teens, Marta Hovsepian, 15, and Kevork Adomian, 16, and their pledge made earlier that, should they survive the genocide being committed by the Turks, they would meet again at the orphanage in Marash, a city in southeastern Turkey. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, with chapters by Marta and Kevork predominating. The story begins with Marta, pregnant from being repeatedly raped by a Turkish man, being returned to the Marash orphanage by the man’s jealous wife. However, Kevork, who has been passing as an Arab, is in Aleppo, Syria, where he takes on the dangerous role of being a courier for foreign missionaries who are financing Armenian safe houses and providing money to those lodged in desert concentration camps where disease and famine are rampant. For readers unfamiliar with the historical event upon which Skrypuch’s work is based, she provides an opening “Historical Note” as well as a period map that allows readers to follow Marta and Kevork’s travels. While the book has a “happy-as-possible-given-the-circumstances” ending, Skrypuch does not sugarcoat the numerous atrocities that were committed against the Armenian minority in Turkey, nor the Armenians’ post-war challenges. Highly recommended.