Review: 3.5 stars
This was my pick for our university girls' book club. With everything happening between Iran and the United States, I wanted to understand, even a little, what it might have felt like to live as a woman in Iran, across some of the most pivotal decades in the country's history. Kamali tells that story through a friendship, which turns out to be exactly the right vessel for it.
'The Lion Women of Tehran' follows Ellie and Homa from childhood in 1950s Tehran through three tumultuous decades. Ellie, lonely after her father's death and newly improverished, finds Homa on the first day of school. Together they dream of becoming "lion women", strong and fearless in the face of whatever comes. Class pulls them apart when Ellie's family reclaims its former privilege, politics pulls them back together, and one devastating betrayal rearranges both of their lives.
Kamali's writing extracts exactly the feelings she intends. You feel your own fingers curl with embarrassment when Homa arrives at Ellie's posh new high school, the smell of the downtown markets still on her, resurrecting Ellie's past of poverty. You experience the visceral shock when Ellie discovers the means through which her mother secures their family's return to their former, wealthier neighborhood.
It reminded me, inevitably, of Ferrante's 'My Brilliant Friend,' one of my favorite books. The architecture is similar - a formative friendship between two girls who take sharply different paths, each watching the other live the life she did not choose. Kamali is honest about how complex that bond is, the undercurrent of competition, the way you can love someone and yet still harbour pangs of jealousy. Despite the trials they endure, Homa and Ellie's friendship is unified always by the intimate bonds forged from being sisters by choice, not blood. Whatever else passes between them, that foundation holds.
The character I admired most was Homa, and her singular tenacity and sense of purpose in fighting for women's rights. Underneath it all, a question I kept turning over: how much do you owe your country? There is a tragedy of the commons in watching others risk their lives for freedoms you would enjoy if they won, knowing you would be no worse off if they lost, since you were never complicit.
The trappings of Ellie's life, the wealth, the beauty, the well-matched husband, make for much easier reading. Part of you enjoys the fairy tale and does not want it blemished by real life. But it is Homa's imperfect, fire-forged life that draws you in. A dark past, an unspeakable period of tragedy, things Ellie can only look upon with pity. Yet through it all, Homa refuses to succumb to victimhood.
By the end, the lionesses of the title step fully forward, each having asserted herself in very different ways. Homa most directly, in her covert efforts against the traditionalist regime, until she arrives at the bleakest realization of the book - no matter which men are in charge, they need someone to subjugate, and that class is invariably, women.
I missed the actual book club discussion, but the verdict that reached me afterward was warm. Everyone liked it and considered it an easy read but an equally touching one. It is a well-written, absorbing story with enough literary grit to make it a worthwhile, though not fully memorable, read. I know very little about Iran, and this book was a small window into what is fought for there, what is won and what is lost.