Peacekeeper's Daughter
A Middle East Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Peacekeeper's Daughter is the astonishing story of a French-Canadian military family stationed in Israel and Lebanon in 1982-1983, told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old girl.
Peacekeeper's Daughter parachutes the reader into the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian crisis, and the wave of terrorism—including the bombing of the American Embassy—that ravaged Beirut at the height of the siege. This novelistic memoir moves from Jerusalem to Tiberius, from the disputed No-Man’s Land of the Golan Heights to Damascus, and on to Beirut by way of Tripoli, crossing borders that remain closed to this day.
It's June, 1982. Twelve-year-old Tanya and her family are preparing to leave their home on the military base in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to move to Israel, where her father will serve a one-year posting with the United Nations. While they're packing up, Israel invades Lebanon. The President-elect of Lebanon is assassinated. Thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children are murdered at the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps in southern Beirut. The Middle East's relative peace explodes into waves of violence.
It is in the midst of this maelstrom that the family arrives in Israel and settles into an apartment. The simple act of walking down the street is fraught with peril. Violence may come at them from any direction at any time. Peacekeeper's Daughter is a coming-of-age story, as well as an exploration of family dynamics, the shattering effects of violence and war—and the power of memory itself to reconcile us to our past selves, to the extraordinary places we have been and sights we have seen.
Customer Reviews
Gut-wrenching hidden gem
Important testimony of a twelve-year-old girl’s witness to war in the Middle East from a new perspective—that of the daughter of a UN peacekeeper. Her experiences are not those of a refugee, but her exposure to death paints an awful picture of war. As well, we are party to the intense loneliness of being an expat in a family which doesn’t exactly fit in anywhere: not missionaries, not diplomats, not businesspeople. Even their sending nation denies their existence.
If I were a secondary school English teacher, I would definitely put this on my students reading list.