Tara Bahrampour was eleven years old at the height of the Islamic Revolution. As the bullets flew over garden walls, she and her family escaped Iran to the Pacific Northwest with one suitcase each. Old enough to remember her Iranian culture, but young enough to embrace America's freedoms, Bahrampour balanced two very different lifestyles in her heart and mind. Having an Iranian father and American mother partially helped Bahrampour navigate the divide while she was young. When Bahrampour returns to Iran for a wedding, she is the first in her family after fifteen years to do so. The perspective from a twenty-six year old woman blossoms from remembered street games and childhood toys into the realities of the treatment of women, ceremony surrounding meals, and the strict regime after the Islamic Revolution. She is understandably nostalgic for the Tehran of her youth but fiercely protective of her Americanized viewpoints and attitudes. At first Bahrampour is naïve to the changes of her homeland's rule and is shocked when she has trouble repossessing her American passport or when she hears stories of people escaping the military by wearing sheepskin and crawling over the border with a herd of sheep. Reality sets in when she is detained for talking to two blond tourists. As a Moslem Iranian woman officials fear her morality could be in danger. In the end, aside from rebuffing marriage proposal after marriage proposal, Bahrampour comes to an understanding about where she belongs. The Iran of her youth has left an indelible mark on her memory. At the core, it is who she is no matter where she goes. ( )

i love memoirs that provide insight into historical events. and i particularly loved this one because it was so honest and never resorted to political rhetoric or really taking sides. the author simply described her experiences living as a child under the rule of the shah, fleeing to the united states right before the revolution, and returning to post-revolutionary iran as an adult. her insights were so honest and all of her thoughts about the good and bad that came from the revolution really captured what seems to be a really complicated political situation. i like how she described both the freedom and oppression she felt when wearing the chador. and she made interesting points about how the anti-west regulations of the revolution brought some back to appreciating certain things of traditional iranian culture.

i just really liked the fact that she could see the good and the bad in both iran and the united states and how there was just a lot of grey area in her reactions to her experiences. especially after reading "reading lolita in tehran" i found this book to be refreshingly balanced. ( )