A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

November 12, 2012
This ambitious novel set in northern Iran in the decade after the 1979 revolution contains not a teaspoon but a ton of history, imagination, and longing. Beginning with the 1981 disappearance of 11-year-old Saba Hafezi’s twin sister, Mahtab, and their mother, Khanom, Nayeri interweaves Saba’s family trauma as seen through the eyes of the women of her seaside village, along with fantasies about Mahtab’s teenage fascination with everything American, shared by her friends Reza and Ponneh. Saba loves Reza, but allows herself to be married off to old Abbas Hossein Abbas, expecting to eventually gain freedom by becoming a rich widow. The characters’ dreams are shattered, however, amid rising violence, as beautiful Ponneh is beaten for wearing red high-heels, Saba is violently attacked by two chador-clad women working for her husband and the new regime, and another woman is hanged for defying the new Islamic norms. Saba’s first tentative protests give way to more drastic decisions as the realities of postrevolution Iran and the truth about her mother and sister sink in. Nayeri crams so much into her story, especially Saba’s distracting fiction of her sister’s life in the United States, that her lyrical evocation of a vanishing Iran gets lost in an irritating narrative tangle. Agent: Kathleen Anderson, Anderson Literary.

December 15, 2012
Elegant aspirational novel of life in post-revolutionary Iran. "The whole town knows the story--the real one--though no one talks about it, because that's our way. We prefer pretty lies to ugly truths." Twin sisters Saba and Mahtab Hafezi live at the end of the universe--or, more specifically, in a tiny rice-farming village deep in the Iranian interior, having moved from Tehran to escape the eyes and hands of the mullahs and revolutionary guards. The place is no Macondo: There's precious little magic to it and a lot of dust and grime. Still, in Nayeri's (Another Jekyll, Another Hyde, 2012, etc.) richly imaginative chronicle, everyone dreams there, not least Saba, whose expectations crumble in the face of a reality for which she's not prepared, having instead devoted herself to moving to America and studying endless English word lists in anticipation ("What is abalone?" she wonders). Her mother, a small force of nature, is a fierce champion, though she's not happy that Saba is out in the sticks: "I won't have her raised in this place...wasting her days with village kids, stuck under a scarf memorizing Arabic and waiting to be arrested." Alas, a mother's protectiveness is not a big enough shield, and Saba finds herself caught up in events much larger than she can imagine. It takes a village full of sometimes odd, sometimes ordinary people to afford Saba the wherewithal to realize her dreams, which take her far, far from there. Lyrical, humane and hopeful; a welcome view of the complexities of small-town life, in this case in a place that inspires fear instead of sympathy.

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September 1, 2012

Tehran-born Nayeri sets her first novel in a village in 1980s Iran where 11-year-old Saba lives with her parents and twin sister, Mahtab. When Mahtab and their father disappear, Saba assumes that they have gone to America, as the sisters always dreamed. The sort of embracing and embraceable culturally far-reaching fiction Riverhead does best.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
Saba Hafezi is certain that she remembers her beloved twin sister, Mahtab, and her mother fleeing Iran for America in 1981, leaving Saba, age 11, behind to live with her emotionally distant father. A determined Saba clings to this memory while growing up in her small rural village under the eyes of her surrogate familythree female neighbors who warily entertain Saba's insistence that Mahtab is alive and welland alongside her best friends Reza and Ponneh. Saba is fascinated with American pop culture and vividly imagines Mahtab's much happier parallel life in America as her own often brutal life unfolds. Saba reluctantly chooses marriage over college, a decision that provides her with financial security at a horrific cost. Meanwhile, Ponneh's activism plunges the lifelong friends into an increasingly complex relationship while inching Saba closer to the truth behind her mother and sister's disappearance. In this substantial novel, Nayeri weaves a variety of narratives throughout Saba's inner and outer journeys, creating a dense exploration of memory and hope within the harsh realities of postrevolutionary Iran.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)