Sandcastle Girls Part 2

Hello Happy Readers,

I hope you are enjoying Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt.   I know Murray Rider is working diligently on some probing questions like what is the best Irish Whiskey!

To continue our discussion of The Sandcastle Girls by Christ Bohjalian I would like to interject a story that came from my mother.  Now I wish I had more details and could ask further questions about it.  For those of you who don’t know, my mother was of Greek ancestry.  Her story was that the Greeks and Turks hated each other for one reason or another (most likely religion – Christian vs. Muslim or land ownership).  Her father was orphaned at a young age.  The story follows that his mother or grandmother was killed by the Turks and that they had cut off her breasts.  So he had passed his hatred for the Turks to my mother and she also tried to pass that hatred along.  So my question to you is there reason to ethnically cleanse?  When you have a homogeneous group living together do they naturally develop a hatred of others?  Chapter Six begins with a wonderful statement:  ‘Ancestral bonds have a tendency to fray over time.  Our connections with the blood that once – generations past – was all that mattered become worn and snap.’

In Chapter 5, Silas Endicott states: ‘We came here to save these exotics, not romance them.’  ‘Exotics’ – defined is distant, foreign, outside the ordinary.  My though on reading this term used is that Silas thought he was saving some sort of flora or fauna. 

Diaspora – defined loosely as the dispersal of Jews initially from Babylon – is a word I had to look up while reading this book.  In most definitions it solely relates to Jews but Bohjalian uses it in relation to the Armenians and it can also be used in relation to the American slave trade.  Do you think we have read enough books dealing with diasporas in recent months????

Maria related that the beginning of this book was confusing without knowing what generation was speaking and the multitude of characters.  There were numerous characters to keep track of in this book and maybe a short diagram of them may have helped in the beginning – kind of a family tree.

For now I will close but I promise to be back in a short time. 

Happy reading,

Barbara