Art is personal, tender, and felt. Academic work trends toward the opposite objective stances and data that reveal replicable truths. Teachers and librarians praise the book for its ability to open readers' hearts and minds to the millions of Syrian refugees today. As social science researchers say in America, the novel Like Water on Stone worked like a classic end run—a football play in which the ball carrier, instead of breaking through the defensive line, attempts to run around one end of it. If social science researchers thinks of politically motivated denial as the defensive line, then stories bypass zombie story rests upon socially constructed lines and go straight to the hearts of individual citizens. Scholarship unequivocally documents that this genocide took place. Yet, it is officially denied by the Turkish government, the successor state of the Ottoman perpetrators. On top of that, the strategic importance of Turkey has led some Western governments to tolerate this denial.