The Lion Women of Tehran

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.

The Coin

Rating: 4.5 stars

As I was flying out of SFO over winter break, I stopped by Compass Books, a well-curated Barnes & Noble independent offshoot. While my kids roamed around, I made my way through the fiction section and came across The Coin. In one simple word, it was fabulous.

The Coin follows a young Palestinian woman living in New York, whose life begins to unravel as her relationship to money, cleanliness, beauty, and power turns increasingly obsessive. Through her work as a teacher and her entanglements with wealth and luxury, the novel examines how identity fractures when control becomes a substitute for meaning.

The novel feels deliberately deranged—a controlled descent into obsession. Zaher fixates on filth and cleanliness and on the unbearable discomfort of believing there is a coin lodged inside her body, resisting logic or medical resolution. The narrator’s CVS Retreat ritual of scrubbing her body for several hours with multiple drugstore detergents, is her attempt at treatment. Her descriptions of curdled skin, soap, dirt, and residue after a bath are visceral - the refuse is her. Why do we become disgusted by what has molted from our bodies, when moments earlier it was an invisible layer inseparable from the self? “I was flushed, clean. I had shed what needed to be shed. At the end of the day it was just garbage. But I had oiled and spiced it up like it was a celebratory leg of lamb.”Paradoxically, as her cleaning compulsions intensify, she begins to intentionally soil both her physical appearance and her reputation.

The coin itself becomes the quiet center of the novel: a lodged object that refuses to be expelled. It represents what cannot be scrubbed away—trauma, class anxiety, displacement, the uneasy inheritance of money and power. Her fixation on cleanliness feels less about hygiene than about control, the hope that if every contaminant is eliminated, something unbearable inside her might finally disappear. The novel insists otherwise.

She moves through men she does not love, yet allows herself to be used, despite her apparent fluency in beauty, class, and their unspoken rules. That contradiction comes into focus with Trenchcoat, a luxury-goods arbitrager she pursues romantically. Through him, she enters a Hermès resale scheme governed by a logic that feels more fixed than nature itself: “Every year, regardless of poverty, war, or famine, the price of the Birkin bag increases.” What begins as satire settles into something colder—luxury as a closed system, impervious to consequence.

The novel reminded me of The Bell Jar—another young woman’s attempt to understand herself beyond accepted norms. While it was gendered expectation for Esther Greenwood’s character, for our narrator in The Coin, wealth, fashion, and education are the catalysts of her undoing. Later on in the novel, the garden she transforms her apartment into becomes an attempt at rebirth. She tries to become one with the earth, and as a reader you feel the devastation of beauty returning to something plain and repulsive. What begins vibrant and alive decays into an odorous heap of rot. Growth and decay are inseparable.

Overall, the writing is compulsively readable and frequently shocking. It reads as if Vogue briefly lost its mind, descended into literary madness, and then re-emerged without explanation. Zaher captures the absurdity of class, the intimacy of obsession, and the uncomfortable truth that self-knowledge does not always arrive gently, or leave us intact.