FICTION

All the Light There Was

by Nancy Kricorian
Houghton Harcourt. Mar. 2013. 288p. ISBN 9780547939940. $24. F
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The German occupation of Paris during World War II holds a special terror for Maral Pegorian's family. Having survived the 1915 Armenian genocide in Turkey, they set out to create a new life in France. War diminishes their hopes as they stockpile food and try to keep out of trouble. However, when the Germans show their true nature and Jewish friends and neighbors are singled out, forced to wear the yellow star, and subsequently deported, Maral's brother Missak and his friends Zaven and Barkev join the French Resistance. Kricorian, whose previous novels Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire have focused on the 20th-century Armenian experience, mines new historical territory in her moving examination of how World War II affected Armenians not only in Paris but also in the Soviet Union.
VERDICT This novel has already been compared to Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key as another exposé of German atrocities in occupied Paris. With a bittersweet love story, examples of everyday heroism, and a community refusing to give in to tyrants, Kricorian's work sheds even more light on the German occupation of France. [See Prepub Alert, 9/23/12.]
Reviewed by Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS , Dec 01, 2012
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