RISE THE EUPHRATES

Edgarian's tale of a displaced victim of the Armenian genocide and the impact of her experience on her daughter and granddaughter in America makes for a deeply affecting story, told with a confidence and lyricism that belie its author's status as a beginner. In 1915, nine-year-old Garod witnesses the deaths of her parents and brother as the Muslim Turks brutally murder a million Armenians, who they fear will otherwise fight with Russia against them. Orphaned, starved, and so traumatized that she has forgotten her own name, the girl christens herself Cafard, after the French word for melancholy, but is inadvertently renamed Casard at Ellis Island when she immigrates to America. There Garod/Casard immediately marries a fellow Armenian refugee, settles into an immigrant enclave in Memorial, Connecticut, and gives birth to a daughter of her own. Seventy years after her arrival in America, her favorite granddaughter, Seta Loon, tells how Casard fought with her growing daughter, beautiful, rebellious Araxie, who wanted only to shed her mother's terrible legacy, live a glamorous life, and see the world. Nevertheless, as Seta herself would eventually learn, ``the daughter assumes what is unfinished in her mother's life''; middle-aged Araxie finds herself rejecting her non-Armenian husband while fighting to keep her own elder daughter at her side. But Seta flees to California as soon as possible to escape Araxie's and Casard's pain. Will her grandmother's friends be happy for her, a calmer 33-year-old Seta wonders as she returns to Memorial pregnant and unmarried, now that she has used her foremothers' experience to create an independent existence? A highly accomplished first novel spanning three very different generations on two continents—and an unusually intelligent look at the American immigrant experience.