The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali is a timely read, a coming-of-age story by the author of The Stationery Store, which also draws on her Iranian background.  Dedicated “to the brave women of Iran,” it is told in the first person, primarily by its chief protagonist, an Iranian girl named Elaheh or Ellie, from a well-off background whose mother’s vision for her life is to socialize with the “right” people and marry advantageously.  In 1950, at the age of seven,  Ellie meets a child from a family of very limited means, Homa, whose home and family are nonetheless welcoming and full of warmth.

Homa’s father’s Communist affiliation led to his becoming a political prisoner, incarcerated for most of the novel.  Homa remains spirited and adventurous. She aspires to go to college to study law and become a judge. Marriage of any sort is of little to no interest to her. Occasionally the writing is from her point of view. Their friendship stretches over decades against the backdrop of Iran’s volatile, often violent politics.

When Ellie’s father dies and leaves their finances strained, Ellie and her mother must move to a small apartment in a low-income neighborhood. Her mother retains her sense of dignity by clinging to her family history, including unspecified royal ancestors. Pressed for money and desperately insecure, she gets married again, to Ellie’s father’s brother, and they return to affluent surroundings, including an elite school for Ellie.  Homa shows up at the same school, apparently  being subsidized, and their friendship deepens. Ellie is swayed by her mother’s vision for her future, the goal being to marry well. Homa prefers to become a political activist, following her father’s path and becoming a Communist, organizing protests against Shah Pahlavi’s regime,  and joining actions supporting human rights.

The Shah had been maneuvered into position in 1953 by the U.S. and U.K. governments, which overthrew parliament member and Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. The Shah unsurprisingly tilted to the West and  loosened his tight grip on Iranian society, but he still used the SAVAK secret police to crack down on critics and political opponents.  Among them were the Islamic extremists, who eventually deposed the Shah, led by the exiled religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned to Iran in 1979, when his fundamentalist followers seized hostages at the American Embassy.

The treatment of women worsened, including restricting what they were allowed to wear, how they could socialize, what their demeanor in public could be, – virtually every aspect of their lives.  More important that her Community sympathy, Homa gets swept up in the larger fight for women’s rights and Iranian democracy, which has bubbled up intermittently in Iran. Increasingly, some men have supported the demonstrations, and sought to protect women who burned their hajibs to protest the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman brutally arrested and tortured for not wearing her hair covering precisely as the morality police dictate.

Ellie and Homa are together in college, but, over the years. their relationship becomes strained as the story twists and they take different paths. Yet their friendship endures in a profound and very touching manner.  Each in her own way becomes a shirzan, a lion woman in Persian language.

Marjan Kamali’s writing attempts to capture details of Iranian life, the colorful markets, their culture, their foods, their celebrations, their superstitions. But her use of language in this sweeping historical novel seems less sophisticated than in the more intimate The Stationery Store and sometimes feels written for the young adult market. She does excel in driving the narrative, and we are drawn into Homa’s and Ellie’s decades-long and compelling bonds.  The fight for women’s rights goes on, getting stronger and stronger, in the novel and in real life.

Readers of The Lion Women of Tehran may also appreciate the recent movie The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a marvelous Iranian movie that covers the same dangerous and paranoid period surrounding the death of Mahsa Amini we learn about in Kamali’s book.