A family epic in the tradition of White Teeth, Middlesex, & Midnight’s Children, although with an ending that is less Dickensian in terms of building to a neat & tidy dénouement. Which I quite liked about it, even though it made the last third feel anticlimactic (the narrator in fact labels the last third the “B-side” and points out that B-sides are usually not as good as A-sides). The 90s and early 00s penchant for every single thread coming together in a tidy way at the end feels a bit contrived; Djavadi’s approach felt truer to life to me.

I loved the interconnectedness of personal and political life here—the narrator is the lesbian daughter of Persian dissidents who flee the country after the rise of Khomeini, so her identity is believably inextricable from the modern politics of Iran. And I liked the way Djavadi handled writing activist characters. 

I also deeply appreciated her depiction of a woman & her female partner making the decision to go through IVF treatment in order to have a baby, rather than adopting. As someone with basically zero native empathy for why someone would do this, I nonetheless really understood and sympathized with Kimiâ’s motivations by the end of the novel. Which shows impressive character work!