Once, when I was reading a poem in a very quiet little coffee shop, my mother interrupted my performance to explain the Indonesian and Dutch vocabulary in my poem. She did not mean any harm by it, she came to this country in the 1960s, and she is used to feeling like foreign words are a problem to explain away, regardless of their poetic effect. My mother is also a writer, English is her third language, and for the most part, our work could not be more different in its ethos. She dislikes stories with too much violence or swearing, and even when she discusses difficult or even traumatic matters, she does so with the relentless positivity that only a former middle school teacher could approach life. And how could I deny that this approached has worked for her and the life she’s built in the USA?

Most of what I could say about The Lion Women of Tehran feels quite similar to my feelings on my mother’s work: broad, sentimental, completely unsurprising, with the over-polished sheen of an uplifting, inspirational film that would net a white woman an Oscar if not for the subject matter. But damn, it knows which beats to hit and it knows it will make you cry. As long as you’re not a completely heartless person who gets irritated by the swelling strings or the narrative saying, “isn’t this so beautiful and brave, isn’t this so inspiring??” which, to be fair, I was in my young adulthood. Approaching this with an open mind, the sincerity and the strength of the bond between women did manage to wring a few tears out of this recovering cynic.

I could point out a lot of reasons why I think this book didn’t work for me specifically. It feels strange to mainly focus on an upper-to-middle class, largely politically uninvolved woman who spends a not-insignificant portion of the book not even in Iran. Even if it wasn’t Marjan Kamali’s intention for this book to be seen as a very accurate snapshot into very real political struggles, especially with this title, it is and will be seen as such, and that’s a little hard to swallow. Kamali does include a rather rote ‘mea culpa’ in her author’s note about how she is a novelist and not a historian, but it cannot be ignored that in attaching this novel of hers to a very politically loaded historical term, she has invited the criticism. Or her publishing house and editor have. Whatever. I don’t mean to speak out of turn, because I am basically as uneducated about the actual particulars of the events in the book as any Millennial American, but it seems to me a little bit like billing a book as being ‘The Birmingham Campaign,’ but mostly it’s from the point of view of someone whose friend went to the protests in the 1960s. I will be seeking out other voices more equipped to critique that aspect before landing on a solid opinion on this, but it just felt like a strange choice.

Again I return to my mother. I don’t think she softens her blows intentionally, or wants for my work, or hers, to be specifically catered to those outside of her experiences. Her internal life, the stories she tells about immigrating, about living as a brown woman in the sixties with a family that worked up from poverty into the middle class, her own trauma and the trauma passed down to her, she tells these stories from her heart, and as an educator, she always aims to be understood in the simplest manner. In a similar way, I think Marjan Kamali is a translator, so I think her writing philosophy probably has an intention design to, well, translate. I think she’s done an excellent job of writing a book for white feminists to discuss in their book clubs, and the overwelming popularity of this book in my local library system is definitely a testament toward that.

I appreciated this book for what it was, and I’m trying my best not to throw it under the bus for not being the kind of thing I personally like when I do sincerely feel like it is very good at the type of book it’s trying to be.

It’s going to make you want Persian food like crazy.