A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea - Dina Nayeri

This book has been on my to-read list for ages, and I'm not entirely sure why I added it.  It probably had something to do with the cover; I love a good silhouette cover and a lyrical title.  It might have also had something to do with the description--Iranian girl (and eventually young woman) uses her love for America to escape.  But honestly, I can't remember on that part now.

The story follows Saba, who loses her mother and her sister on the same day in the years following the Iranian revolution.  She's convinced they flew off to America, leaving Saba and her father behind.  Others insist that her mother is gone and her sister is dead, but Saba's belief that they are alive is so all-encompassing that she had me half-convinced that she was right--and there really was no telling what happened to her mother... Wrapped up in her beliefs, Saba embraces forbidden American culture through books, movies, and TV shows, and tells stories of her sister Mahtab's new life in America.  As Saba grows up and goes through love and marriage and abuse and heartbreak on many fronts, she dreams of making it to America herself, even refusing to go to college in Iran because she is saving herself for an American education.

This was somewhat of a slow book, and it took me a while to get through it even though it wasn't that long in pages.  The plot is entirely Saba's longing to escape and everything that gets in her way.  While there are definitely bad parts of her story--something that her husband does to preserve his honor and her inheritance, the laws that mean she won't get the inheritance anyway even though she has a marriage contract to preserve it, the way her friend is beaten for being "immodest" but really for being beautiful and saying "no," and various other cultural aspects that come in the wake of the revolution--are certainly reprehensible.  But there's a certain idolization of American culture that didn't seem healthy, either.  And when Saba finally does escape, we're led to believe that her life, with few exceptions, really is as hunky-dory as she had imagined it to be.  The book finishes up just after 9/11, and while Saba admits that it will make it harder for her to visit her family still in Iran or for them to visit her in America, that's really the only consequence of her life, as she's spent so long making herself American from afar that she's not really Iranian anymore.  This was a weird dynamic to me, and one that I don't feel great about looking back; it just rubs me the wrong way for some reason.  It felt like Saba was willing to just write off all of the good things--and there certainly were good things, she listed them numerous times--in exchange for books and TV and music, which seemed very shallow of her, just like one of the old woman of her town was always accusing her of being.

I wanted to like Saba as a character, but I just couldn't quite bring myself to do it.  Really, none of the characters here were very likable--I felt like they were all very self-absorbed and greedy.  The exception was probably Ponneh, but then she jumped too far into a resistance and dragged her friends into danger with her when they didn't want anything to do with it, so I kind of lost my sympathy there as well.  I think Nayeri did a wonderful job with the setting of the book, but the actual characters left a lot to be desired for me, and the slow pacing didn't help either.

2 stars out of 5.

Rooftops of Tehran - Mahbod Seraji

Rooftops of Tehran is the story of Pasha, a 17-year-old Iranian, and his best friends as they go through about a year in Tehran in the 1970s.  Pasha and his friend Ahmed spend lots of time on the roof of Pasha's house, joking and talking about life and Ahmed's crush, and later on Pasha's own crush.  Pasha is in love with girl-next-door Zari, who is engaged to Doctor, a revolutionary young man whom Pasha greatly admires.  Revolutionary activity is on the rise at this time period, and everyone is terrified of SAVAK, the secret police force.

The first half of the book was just okay.  It's about Pasha and his friends, including Zari, as they go through a summer and grieve the loss of someone close to them.  The first half concludes with a catastrophe that completely overturns everything Pasha had planned for his life.  It's also filled with snippets of life in Pasha's alley, like soccer games and incidents at school.  This part of the book, while it had its moments, was overall boring to me.  I understand its purpose in the buildup to and contrast with the second half, but it just didn't grab me.  This part is also cut with "interludes" every couple of chapters, which detail Pasha in a mental hospital trying to piece together what happened and why he is there.

The second half is Pasha trying to recover from his experience and move on.  This half was truly beautiful to me.  I think Seraji did a beautiful job of depicting Pasha's grief, his distance from everyone and everything around him, and how he copes with his new world.  It was wonderfully written, overall.  I suspected the ending was coming from pretty much the first chapter in the second half--which isn't good, because I never saw the climax of the first half coming.  I was actually a little let down that Seraji didn't have some twist at the end, because the ending is hinted at all along.  While the ending was good, I think it could have been better if Pasha had been forced to actually deal with something rather than just having it handed to him again.

The character development in this was great on all fronts, and I got a really good feel for life in Pasha's alley.  I think the whole setting was done very well.

Overall, an above-average book, but not an absolutely fabulous one.  I doubt I'll remember it in a year or two, but it was a pleasure reading now.

3.5 stars out of 5.

The Blood of Flowers - Anita Amirrezvani

So, this is one of those books where the heroine never gets a name.  I've seen this before, most memorably in Daphne DeMaurier's Rebecca, but I don't particularly like it.  I know the book is written in first person, so we shouldn't really need that much of a name, but I still like knowing how to refer to the main character.  However, I didn't actually realize she doesn't have a name until I wrote this review.  Throughout the entire book, I did keep wondering what her name is, but I just presumed that it was mentioned and I forgot about it.  So I guess it works, as long as you don't really want to discuss the main character with anyone.

This is the second book of Amirrezvani's that I've read, the first being Equal of the Sun.  Honestly, I liked EotS better.  The main characters were far more engaging, the setting more entrancing, and the plot actually moved.  Most of The Blood of Flowers involves the heroine wanting to get married, making rugs, drawing pictures, and being subjected to the whims of her wicked aunt.  While this isn't a bad lifestyle (hey, I've said it before and I'll say it again: I would be perfectly fine being a 50s housewife) it's not exactly the most thrilling to read about.  Most of the intrigue comes from the heroine's relationships with other people, but even those peter out and aren't as artfully dramatic as they could be.

I was expecting more of this book.  The back promises that the heroine "blossoms as a brilliant designer of carpets."  She doesn't.  She makes one good design throughout the entire book, and can't even pull that off without copious amounts of work from her uncle.  While I appreciate that Amirrezvani wanted to show her heroine stumbling, making mistakes, and learning from them, I just felt like some awesome storyline was being missed out on.  Something about the heroine's genius rug designs and using them to gain influence and power or make political statements or something like that.  Something, I don't know...more Equal of the Sun-like.  This was a completely different premise than EotS, and I can respect that, but that doesn't mean I particularly liked it.  While the writing is generally good, it tends to telling more than showing in some places, and the story just isn't as engaging as it could be.

On the other hand, I did learn a lot about making rugs.  So there's that, I guess.

2.5 stars out of 5.

Assassins of the Turquoise Palace - Roya Hakakian

The biggest problem with Assassins of the Turquoise Palace is that I had no idea what it was about.  Having been raised in the good ol' US of A, I have been pretty much perpetually inundated with messages of "Iran is bad.  Bad bad bad."  While I doubt that's true in its entirety--few things ever are--there are a myriad of areas in which it does seem to have merit.  For example, the Iranian government's ordering of the killings in this book.  That wasn't exactly cool.  But what I was left wondering, for the entire book, was why it was ordered in the first place.  I think it had something to do with Kurds.  I don't know much about Kurds, pretty much just that they're a group of people in the Middle East who don't have a country of their own, much like the Roma, or the Jews before Israel was created, or the Palestinians today.  I don't know why the Iranian government wanted these particular Kurds dead.  Or were they Kurds?  Was that ever said?  I think it was mentioned that they supported an independent country for Kurdistan, but just because they supported it doesn't meant they were Kurds themselves.

You might see why this book left me a little confused.  Parts of the book also rambled or jumped around a bit too much; I have never seen more pagebreaks in my life, I swear!  It made following the multiple characters a little more difficult than I would have liked.

Also, despite the book being entitled Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, very little time is spent talking about the Turquoise Palace, the assassins, or even the assassination.  The focus is on the 90's-era trial of the men accused of killing several Iranian activists in Berlin.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love me a good trial.  I am an avid watcher of Law & Order (but only the episodes with McCoy, because he is a badass in the courtroom) and I take law classes for fun at my university.  And I do think that the trial and everything surrounding it was written very well, and was very easy to read; no slogging through legal mumbo-jumbo required.  But, if I'm picking up a book called Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, I really do expect the focus to be somewhat on the assassins.  I would have liked that story.  How did these people get to be killers, anyway?  It's entirely possible that book can't be written, because of a dearth of sources or something like that, but I think it would have been a more compelling read.  Not that a quest for justice is un-compelling, but... I don't know.  It just wasn't what I thought it was going to be, and what it was wasn't enough to make up for that.

One more thing.  While the writing is very detailed, which is what makes it so readable, I'm skeptical of how accurate it is.  Including dreams and feelings can be done in a nonfiction book through detailed interviews, but that would be very detailed indeed.  I'm skeptical if, at times, Hakakian isn't speculating and putting her own words or feelings into the mouths and hearts of the people of the book.

And can we talk about that cover for a second?  It  doesn't influence my opinion of the book, but man, that is some of the worst photo-editing I've ever seen.

So, lacking some information that made it a bit hard to understand, with a bit of a jumpy structure, it was a hard book to really get into.  While its actual topic was well-written, for the most part, it isn't a book I would pick up again.

2 stars out of 5.