Reading In Case of Emergency felt like lighting a match in a windstorm—chaotic, brief, and impossible to ignore. From the very first page, Shadi is not here to make sense to us. She’s not a role model, not even a reliable narrator. What she is, though, is a disillusioned, sarcastic, opium-addled woman careening through a crumbling Tehran in search of something—anything—that might feel like relief. The novel unfolds in a single day, but that day stretches like a lifetime when your body is in withdrawal and your country is shaking itself apart.

Mohebali’s prose, carried deftly into English by Mariam Rahmani, is electric. The translation doesn’t flatten Shadi’s brash, clever, and often vulgar voice—instead, it crackles with her sharp-tongued resistance to femininity, religion, family roles, and respectability itself. Shadi drifts through the city in oversized clothes, misgendered as a man, mocking everything and everyone with a bitterness that never quite conceals her ache. She is as much a product of privilege as she is a victim of a society that has no space for her refusal to perform.

This book is messy, jarring, and deeply honest about the futility of survival under systems that were never meant for us to thrive in. There’s no narrative arc of redemption here—just a slow unraveling, a deep exhaustion, and a raw glimpse into Iranian youth culture post-revolution, where resistance isn’t clean or heroic, but often fueled by spite and narcotics.

I loved how the novel made space for gender nonconformity and the grotesque as forms of rebellion. I loved how Rahmani’s translation honored the slang, the bile, the barely-holding-it-together brilliance of Shadi’s voice. In Case of Emergency is not a comfortable read, but if reading is liberation, then this book cracks something open—something bloody, blunt, and beautifully blasphemous.

📖 Read this if you love: gritty character studies, unapologetic anti-respectability politics, and stories that explore collapse as both external chaos and internal unraveling.

🔑 Key Themes: Gender Nonconformity and Rebellion, Addiction and Escapism, Class Privilege and National Disillusionment, Post-Revolutionary Malaise, Intergenerational Trauma.