Rating: WORTHY!
This is a kind of coming-of-age story and although I typically don't like those, this was not your stereotypical USA cutely white-washed pretense. Instead, and this was the reason I was attracted to it, it was about an Iranian girl growing-up in the USA during the time of the Iranian Hostage crisis in 1979 - 1980. It's autobiographical, but with a lot of fiction mixed in.
Note that Iranians not actually Arabic. They are Aryan, aka Indo-European. Arabs are a Semitic people, so there is a difference, although to western eyes they are all-too-often "just the same." Iran used to be known as Persia, which sounds far more exotic, doesn't it? The hostage crisis arose out of the overthrow of the US supported (or perhaps more accurately, 'puppeteered') Shah of Persia, and is one more example of the US getting itself into embarrassingly hot water because of poor foreign policy choices and grotesque short-sightedness in demonstrating a complete lack of empathy for what a people need and instead exhibiting a tunnel vision for what the US demands. I was glad to see some of this come through in the story that was told.
The whole process of having the Shah dance to the US's tune because of oil is what has led not only to the hostage crisis which brought down the Carter government (although the Reagan government for all its bluster, continued exactly the same policy!), but also directly to the present troubles which are no more than the just deserts of poor policy choices in the past. Of course, there is no excuse for taking hostages and punishing the innocent, but this punishing took place on both sides, and the Iranians began by punishing their own people after the Ayatollah took over, remember! It began with US policy effectively punishing poor Iranians. Later, Iranian students punished the US embassy people. Subsequent to that, US residents punished innocent Iranians living in the USA, and so the wheel turns. As Ghandi said, an eye for an eye ends up leaving everybody blind. What he didn't say is that if people start out blind to begin with, this exactly what we should expect.
This author does a wonderfully humorous job of depicting other events, as some of the chapter headings make clear:
Sultans of Suntan
Never Owned a Camel
and
Are You There, Allah? It’s Me, Zomorod
The crisis, for me, was rather too intrusive, although it was obviously a critical and tragic event which cast a huge shadow over their lives. That said, it wasn't such a large part of the story that it overwhelmed other things which to me were more interesting because they were less predictable. I loved the humor in contrasting Iranian life with the life she experienced in the USA, but it bothered me that the wider perspective she thought she was bringing was in its own way just as blinkered as the one she sought to supplant, since the impression given here is that an exile can only get a decent life in the USA! There is this strong suggestion that nowhere else in the world can really offer anyone a life except for the US, and while Iran was criticized routinely, this same gimlet eye was never applied to the USA except in the most limited fashion. Frankly, that's nothing but a jingoistic insult to the rest of the world!
Those complaints aside, I did enjoy this story - the humor more than the horror, but both were engaging - and I recommend it as an educational and entertaining story.
