The Benefits
I listened to the audiobook, which enhanced the experience enormously. I could listen to the smoke-thick and honey-smooth voice of iconic Iranian-American actress Shohreh Aghdashloo for an age. Her tone, sage and shrewd, grandmotherly, yet revealing a hint of the sensual woman beneath, lends itself to a narration that brings earth and fire to this tale; she truly bends the spine and knobs the fingers as she relates the joyous agony of carpet weaving, coats the dust of the street on your skin, and soothes it once again in the hot aromatic steam bath of the cleansing hammam. I wish Aghdashloo would narrate more audiobooks, for I’d listen to them all.

This ends well. The final third of the novel is recompense and forgiveness, an unmasking of shame, a loss of naivety, and our unnamed heroine matures into womanhood, marred but wiser for it, and she directs her life towards a true-to-context pursuit of equity and justice, despite the snags of society that clutch at her chador. It finally becomes the novel it promised to be from the start.

The Big Bother
In constructing our heroine’s closet of shame, stripping off her innocence, dragging her down to the depths of despair by the unfair hand that distributes society’s wealth, and marring her every relationship, the author offers far too much erotic detail in what feels like modern American language. While this sordid descent is absolutely necessary to the plot—and to the awakening of our girl on her journey to self-actualisation—the delivery is… well, it’s counterproductive in its purpose to be eventually empowering. I believe the demeaning detail is unnecessary to the overall story; it serves to give explicit imagery to the very thing the novel advocates against, that is: it promotes that women be well-versed sex-slaves, valued solely for their private performance (giving great details of such), regardless of their brains, personality, talents, or any other distinct individual or female characteristics. And yet, the novel itself reels against such exploitation and patriarchal oppression.

The author says (in a post-novel interview) that her friend would let her 13 year old daughter read this, and I think to myself: only in a world where the 13 year old was preparing to be sold off to a man twice her age and required to earn her place as a first/only wife in his household. I don’t want to live in that world. I don’t want any 13 year old to live in that world… and I think the author would agree whole-heartedly. So, I’m left a bit baffled at the editor-author combined decision to include such details in these passages, for the information and idea of the oppression and our heroine’s naive submission to the systemic abuse could have been adequately communicated without the digression to smut. Let other smutty novels do that work as they please (and let readers be properly pleased by them). Novels written with the intent to empower should communicate oppression and shame by transmitting a spirit of power to overcome, not promulgate and glorify the acts that bring about the shame. The middle third of the novel was wholly dedicated to these racy details, and I nearly dropped it, if not for the narrator. Honestly, innuendo and euphemism have their place, and they could have been employed and thrived on these pages, but instead we got EL James wrapped up in the Kama Sutra…

The Beauty
Again, I applaud the choice of narrator for the audiobook, and I’m glad I listened. The writing is simple overall, but not simplistic, and the folkloric tales woven between the story are prophetic and relevant—and beautiful—culminating in the most creative tale of all (which the author invented herself). The passages that centred on carpet-weaving in the 17th Century, including careful choice of wool and colour, the imagining and creation of unique designs, and the relationship developed with her mentor, all served to enrich the novel’s setting and characters. The journey of mother and daughter is adequately harsh and peppered with the distrust and distaste every mother and daughter experience in this tumultuous and fragile human relationship, yet it is also filled with the joy of life and love that can only be shared between mother and daughter; a thread of golden hope, even when it is thin and frayed.

…
‘Often we must live with imperfection, she said. ‘And when people worry about a stain on their floor, what do they do?’
Despite how I felt, I had to laugh, for I knew what she meant: ‘They throw a carpet over it,’ I replied.
‘From Sheraz to Tabriz, from Baghdad to Herot, that is what Iranians do,’ she said.
I was quiet for a moment, for that was at the heart of it.
…