Review: Rise the Euphrates

Rise the Euphrates by Carol Edgarian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The daughter assumes what is unfinished in her mother's life. The unanswered questions become her work. She spins, turning the questions upon herself. Generation after generation, it is a spiraling."
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This is one of the books I've had on my TBR since I started reading around the world and collecting titles to read. I was glad to finally get to it!

The book starts with harrowing scenes from the Armenian Genocide as the grandmother of Seta Loon escapes the country. The story goes on to show how Seta's mother made her way still very much inside the Armenian immigrant community, and how Seta and her siblings/friends move beyond it in some ways but are bound to it by others. The novel grows increasingly focused on Seta and her small world to where it almost feels like two novels for a while, but I thought the author did a good job connecting her journey back to that of her grandmother's life.

There is heavy reliance on the Armenian storytelling phrase that has siblings in Turkish, Greek, and even Cypriot storytelling - "there was and there was not."

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