✔ 2 friends growing up in different environment in Tehran ✔ Heart breaking lives of the 2 girls and their shattered dreams ✔ Powerful story about friendship and women who don't bow down
★★★★★ Iran, beautiful culture and customs, particularly important is how the women in Iran have been enduring and fighting. They don't give up. Powerful story about friendship and not giving up.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
For all the lion women fighting and enduring
Another book on Iranian women, after The Persians. And this one is straightforward as a story, yet powerful. It's a story of two girls who met at the age of seven in 1950s and are bonded throughout their lives. One from bourgeois family another from poverty, but they both pledge to study hard to become lion women to serve their country. But, everything is changed while they were at Tehran University.
Power of friendship, power of traditions, of courage, of mothers, and of women. Shir zan, woman with courage of a lion. Homa is determined to raise her voice even if that leads to her dangers. She was certainly not alone. In Iran, these brave women have been fighting for decades, fighting and enduring, because they have hope their beloved country.
Ellie's relationship with her mother is also interesting. The tradition can form your actions, and suffering can affect your way of thinking. But it's not about judging the traditional way of life, it's about the freedom to choose, even if that comes with cost.
The last 2 books I read on Iran are about how the women are powerful, they won't bow down, despite the incredibly harsh and brutal environment. Fictions are not lies, these are the stories of real women and men.
The Persians
Sanam Mahloudji, 2025
384 pages
Read in 2016.02
check synopsis and details on amazon.com
🔽 Intro and review summary 🔽
✔ 3 generations of Iranian women and their stories
✔ 2 remain to endure the revolution, the rest migrate to the UK
✔ Powerful novel and the proud, bold and lovable women
★★★★★ The dynamics of the 3 generations of these women, these proud, bold, beautiful, lovable women. They all want to live their lives fully.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
I've set a theme for this month which is women, and what a perfect start.
A noble, or ex-noble Valiat family, a family that produced a national hero,. The story is about their women who left for America, and those who stayed in Iran after the revolution. It definitely reminds you of Persepolis, but this one has even more incendiaries. The dynamics of the 3 generations of these women, these proud, bold, beautiful, lovable women.
By following the perspectives different women, it shows you the very different lives they've led, how the women in Iran really lived behind the veils, against the money-making shallow lives in America. But it's not only the countries that determine their lives, like Elizabeth being a woman in Iran in the 1940s is different from being one during the 80s, like Niaz.
But one thing is common between these women across 3 generations, they all want to live their lives fully. They want to love freely, they want to discard freely, and they want to embrace each other despite their regrets, grudges, and lies.
Afterall, as Shirin the entrepreneur says, America is younger than their favourite jewellery, so of course their lives are extravagant. Just that their extravagance is not shallow.
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