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Nicolai’s Daughters

by Stella Leventoyannis Harvey

Stella Leventoyannis Harvey, a founding member of the Whistler Writers Group, discovered inspiration for her first novel while visiting a monument to the Nazi massacre of 696 Greek men and boys in the Achaean region of Kalavryta. Nicolai’s Daughters flips between the perspectives of Nicolai, a Vancouver immigrant who returns to Achaea after the death of his wife, and his grown daughter Alexia, who retraces her father’s steps 24 years later. Both discover a family secret: Nicolai’s father let German soldiers sodomize him on the condition that his family be spared. While Nicolai runs from the revelation, Alexia decides to face up to its repercussions head-on.

The parallel narrative allows Harvey to demonstrate how differences in character and circumstance can result in drastically divergent life choices. In some of the more Oedipal scenes – when Alexia allows her father’s boyhood friend to seduce her, for example – the reappearance of characters at different historical periods maximizes the dramatic irony and impact. Short scenes push the complex plot forward, and Harvey’s simple sentence structures complement her harsher themes: abandonment, banishment, incest, and sacrifice.

Despite its heavy subject matter, Nicolai’s Daughters spends more time moving Alexia through a clichéd regime of Mediterranean relaxation – sex on the beach, raucous relatives, and Greek cuisine – than explaining how the aftermath of the massacre affected the town. In the lighter scenes, Harvey’s writing is vague and her sentiments automatic. The result too often resembles a chick-lit travelogue rather than the literary novel the weighty material implies.

 

Reviewer: Ashleigh Gaul

Publisher: Signature Editions

DETAILS

Price: $22.95

Page Count: 316 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-89710-997-7

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2013-1

Categories: Fiction: Novels