This is a story worth telling. Not many have lived through such tumultuous times in their homelands and survived with enough sanity to tell the tale. I have read many stories around the world wars by Europeans. But there are so few such stories from the non-European perspective. I found the language and narration a bit hard to get into at times. It lacked flow in many places. But the subject matter made the writing flaws almost insignificant.
It was easy to sympathize with the author in most places. The only part I failed to understand was why his family believed he had become emotionally distant a long time ago. He describes his mother's hardness when dealing with impossible loss. He comes across as a sensitive enough child to understand that his mother's loss was tremendous and perhaps most sad. But he doesn't describe how exactly he became distant from his family later on. He seemed to try hard to give her security, but she still craves for some of the love that she lost in the war. Why did he fall short? These aspects were never explored in the book.
The novel, however, offers excellent views into the lives of sheltered women in Muslim Turkey. Hiding them from the world left them ignorant and vulnerable in hard times when the men were no longer around to "protect them". It was heart breaking at times to see these proud upper-class women who were never taught anything besides rudimentary household skills come to terms with their new reality.
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