Like her first novel, Three

Armenian Diaspora

The Washington Post
April 18, 2004 Sunday

Like her first novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, Micheline
Aharonian Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy (Riverhead, $23.95) revolves
around the Armenian genocide committed by Ottoman Turks from
1915-23. This time Marcom concerns herself with the campaign’s
aftermath, when Armenians have dispersed to, among other places,
idyllic Beirut in the 1960s, before the onset of civil war there.

The narrator is troubled by memories of not just the genocide but the
long-ago suicide of a boy he hardly knew (“You were brave, not, as
they claimed, a coward. Is there a more courageous man than the man
who with his will unmakes his life?”). The novel incorporates takes
such diverse approaches to its material as an old photograph of boys
at an orphanage, lists, an application form, and short chapters in
which the narrator descends into his haunted self.

— Dennis Drabelle