Yeah, i read that book Ges Go and liked it.NOT ordered in recent months or years!! If an order now shows, mistake by Amazo , okayI wasn't going to read this book, but I just had not choice! My conscience wouldn't allow me to skip over reading this potential book! It even ended up on Oprah's book of the week list!This is a book about a young American woman from Boston goes with her father to the Ottoman Empire to help assist the Armenians who were deported to Syria in the Ottoman Empire in an organization that helps and tries to save Armenians. They want to find out where the Armenians that were moved to their area by the Turkish soldiers were moved to. Where the Armenians were moved to is kind of obvious if you know about the Armenian Holocaust enough.Elisabeth falls in love with an Armenian who escaped being murdered by the Turkish gov, who also lost his wife, and his child died. She makes all kinds of friends too, besides the organization director, she befriends an Armenian woman who is widowed but is also very smart! She befriends a little Armenian girl who lost her sister and mother to the Turks. She also has a Turkish doctor for a friend who helps her learn Turkish and teaches her the foundations of Islam of how it should be taught! She also befriends two Germans who photographed the Armenians in their area to hopefully show the world how horrible they were being treated by the Turks (possibly a satire off of Armin Wegner).Flash-forwarded to the present, Laura an American woman who is of Armenian descent and Elisabeth's granddaughter looks into her almost forgotten and not talked about much past. It concerns mainly of how her grandparents met, how her relationship with a Turkish boy when she was a teenager affected her, and how she ended up becoming interested in the Armenian Holocaust.It also has a good twist at the end!Here are the conclusions I drawn from the book:-This is a good book, it's a good example as to why the US shouldn't sweep what happened to the Armenians under the rug. In fact, what the author might have forgotten to mention was that Hitler knew about the Armenian Holocaust, and used it as a way to murder the Jews, Slavics and everyone else. The man who came up with the term genocide was not only a Jew, but he used the Armenian Genocide as a poster child of what a genocide was besides the Holocaust against the Jews. We just can't afford to sweep this genocide under the rug, too many Christians in Muslim ruled countries are still being targeted for extermination because they refuse to learn from this history!-There is also war in this book, and while WW1 was almost 100 years ago, we can't sweep this under the rug either. It seems to me that WW1 is the war that nobody wants to talk about, you hear them talk about WW2 and the Jewish Holocaust a lot more in the media. To sweep what happened to our soldiers and others under the rug compared to WW2 just because less people died in WW1 than WW2, it's a form of disrespect for all the solders of WW1 who died and served all the countries they were serving when WW1 happened! You have to remember that this war at the time was serious because everyone thought that this war was going to end soon, but then a bunch of chain reactions turned it into a World War and the largest amount of casualties for the time made people want to forget about it and sweep it under the rug. We need to appreciate our WW1 solders around the world too!-It's another example of how the humane principles of Islam were turned into a weapon for the Young Turks to persecute and murder their Christian population. We need to teach our children that putting Islam in a government is not the same as following the actual principles of Islam. This is a common thing that humans are capable of doing, if many Christian rulers could desecrate the humane foundations of Christianity then Muslims who put religion in the government aren't spared. In fact, nobody is spared.It turned out to be the horrors of the events chronicled in this novel that ended up having the most impact on me, and not the characters through whose eyes Bohjalian tells this story of a part of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and onward by the Ottoman rulers and the "young Turks" -- a genocide that it's still impossible to discuss in today's Turkey, where denial is the rule.Bohjalian is to be commended for taking on the task of trying to make the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the desert wastes of Turkey and Syria as vivid in our imaginations as is the Holocaust. But while there have been so many great novels set against the background of the Holocaust, this isn't a great novel, merely an adequate and rather predictable one. We know from the first pages that the narrator's Armenian grandfather and Boston-born grandmother meet in Aleppo (modern-day Syria) at the height of the massacre, and end up building a life together; the only question becomes how that happens. Somehow, Armen must survive the genocide and Gallipoli -- but obviously that happens, so there's less suspense. Obviously, Elizabeth in her turn makes it out of Aleppo, and any barriers to their love prove surmountable.There are horrors here -- very vividly depicted, in sometimes nauseating detail. But without the sense of our primary characters -- Armen, Elizabeth or Laura, the present narrator -- having their lives at stake or their sense of selves deeply threatened -- it is too often a less engaging narrative than the nature of the story demands. Perhaps had Bohjalian chosen not to blend Laura's quest for the truth of her grandparent's experiences with the main story set in 1915, I would have found myself as caught up in Bohjalian's fictional story as I was with the historical facts? And perhaps this is a better novel for someone to read who isn't at all familiar with the history. I had been lucky enough to read another novel about 18 months ago,