The Road From Home: A True Story of Courage, Survival and Hope

"In this fictionalized autobiography of his mother, Kherdian tells of a little girl's joy in the food and family life in her close Turkish Armenian community, then the horrors and suffering that began when thousands of Armenians are rounded up and marched toward the desert where they were sure to

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die. A cholera epidemic took Veran's sisters and brothers en route; her mother gave up life after the death of the sons whom she had favored; her father was killed shortly afterward; and Veran spent her growing-up years with a succession of kind and unkind aunts, in an orphanage, and in hospitals after a Greek attack on her Turkish city blew off a chunk of her leg. Veran's early dreams of getting back to her grandmother were replaced by dreams of America, and as the book ends she is 15 and on her way--via a family-arranged marriage to the author's father, whom she has not yet seen. Kherdian well captures the voice of a basically optimistic and very likable young girl, and whether the scene is a garden picnic or mass death and panic at the harbor where everyone is fleeing the Turks, it is seen through her eyes and reported as if from vivid memory." www.kirkusreviews.com

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