Daughters of Smoke and Fire

April 1, 2020
Leila and her little brother, Chia, are Kurds living in Iran in the 1980s. They play games to distract themselves from their father's depression following seven years in prison, and from their mother's anger. Leila dreams of becoming a filmmaker, while confronting the limits of being a Kurdish woman in a society with strict expectations for womanhood. Chia wants to be a human rights lawyer to protest the injustices and violence that the Kurds face, which puts his life and, later, Leila's at risk. Told primarily from Leila's perspective with interludes from her father and Chia, journalist and activist Homa's debut novel is a coming-of-age story that layers intergenerational trauma and political commentary on a decades-long epic. Homa's attention to gender is particularly clear throughout Leila's path to adulthood. Homa was inspired by Kurdish human rights activist and schoolteacher Farzad Kamangar, who was executed in Iran in 2010. Her portrait of Kurdish life in Iran brings readers closer to lived experiences that force questions of identity, homeland, and the traumas we inherit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)