Review: The Persians: A Novel

The Persians: A Novel by Sanam Mahloudji
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

1.5 This is a reprint from 2024 Germany. Publisher ‏ : ‎ Piper ebooks; 1st edition (May 31, 2024)

Darkly funny" this book was not. Dark, yes; funny, no. Too many generations of self-centered, selfish elitists who come to this country to escape persecution (and of course never file for a green card) and try to be the same things - well, most of them try. I was trepaditious when in the first chapter we see nearly the whole lot of them doing coke, drinking, and stealing. And pretty much trashing a hotel room in Aspen, Colorado, while there for a family reunion for Christmas.

For me, the book went downhill from there. I get bored when most of any book is centered on introspection - pages and pages of woe is me.

I gave it my best shot and made it to 50% of this book. This was enough for me to give my honest opinion.

*ARC supplied by Blackstone Publishing, Inc/Scribner, the author, and NetGalley.

View all my reviews

SYNOPSIS: "A family confronts a past that is both keeping them together and preventing them from breaking free.

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran they were somebodies. In America they’re nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose who stayed in Tehran during the revolution. Her daughters, Shirin and Seema, left for America in 1979. She lives in a shabby apartment, paranoid and alone—except when she is visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law–breaking granddaughter who takes her debauchery with a side of purpose yet somehow manages to survive. The other granddaughter, Bita, is a self-righteous but lost law student spending her days in New York City eating pancakes and quietly giving away her belongings.

When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family’s brittle status quo cracks open. Shirin embarks upon a grand but half-baked quest to restore the family name—but what does that even mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Will they ever realize that life is more than just an old story?"