Rate this book

Sky Of Red Poppies - Excerpt From 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Entry (2000)

by Zohreh Ghahremani(Favorite Author)

3.93 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

review 1: I don't know for certain how or when I obtained this book. It was on my Kindle and it's a good possibility it was a free download, so I probably read the summary & figured it sounded good for "free."Wow. What a fantastic story! It's told from the perspective of a Persian girl growing up in Iran. We follow her life through adolescence and adulthood. Through her mostly non-political eyes, we see what it was like to grow up in a country where freedom did not exist.Without giving too much away, we mourn her losses and celebrate her triumphs. She is not unlike a typical American teenager in many ways -- sometimes defiant, sometimes a little too curious. But she loves her family dearly and tries her best to live her life according to her demanding, but loving father's rules. We ... moresee that he has his reasons for being the way he is, and by the end of the story, we love him too.I didn't like the flow of the book, but I did like the story. There were times the author maybe could have transitioned a little more smoothly, but I figured it out eventually and learned to expect a rough transition here & there.
review 2: Zoe, as she prefers to be called, came to our book club and greatly expanded our understanding of her compelling novel/memoir in the ensuing discussion. The story is largely memoir, with only the ending merging into fiction, and details an engrossing friendship between two unlikely friends from dissimilar backgrounds whom the events preceding the fall of the Shah precipitate into taking or not taking political positions which will tragically affect their lives and their families. This "sky of red poppies" is a metaphor for that which is beautiful, ephemeral, and carries within its beauty a poison with calamitous results. The character of Shireen will be forever imbedded in my mind, as well as her alter ego, the cautious girl from an upper class family, the author, who admires her friend but cannot join her in her brave fight against the governmental tyranny of the Shah and his secret police, the dreaded SAVAK. Other characters from the novel resonate equally, the teacher who seems so admirable and is persecuted, but here Ghahremani avoids the pitfall of stereotypes we have come to expect; this teacher is not what we would expect and his role in the tragedy is only one of the twists in this fascinating story. What make this literary fiction as opposed to just another work of contemporary fiction is the complexity of the plot and how all the classes of society are interwoven--secular and fundamentalist, upper, lower and servant classes, characters who refuse to fit into stereotypes, neither completely heroic nor completely evil: all of Iran is present in the story as the country moves from being Persia to the Iran of the Ayatollahs, a transition that is beautifully and richly mirrored in this Sky of Red Poppies. less

Download links for: Sky of Red Poppies - excerpt from 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Entry

Advertising