The novel offers a nuanced portrayal of the female experience, highlighting both the quiet strength and vulnerability that define these women's lives. Khadivi’s storytelling is both intimate and powerful, prompting reflection on the universality of female resilience and the specific cultural realities that shape these stories.

So pleased I received a copy of this lovely book from NetGalley.
It was a thoughtful and emotional read that stayed with me after I finished it.
Heti learns about her mother’s past following her death.
Gradually parts of the past are revealed, by various conversations in the lead up to the 1 year anniversary of the mother’s death.

It wasn't written in the way I was anticipating, but I still didn't mind it being written as pieces of conversation throughout a year's time. I wasn't the biggest fan of the sexualised parts of the book, but I get why these subjects came up.
One line from the book sat with me the most, "..but then I realized that I married him because he's not an immigrant, because he doesn't wake up every day and think what if something happens, he just wakes up and waits for the world to give him what he wants."
Feminist lit fans will enjoy this book and those who are big fans of literary fiction at its essence.

A great little read. Enjoyed watching the story of her mothers past unfold. The writing never felt flat or bloated just smooth and kept me hooked.

This is a wonderful book and beautifully written. I will definitely be finding the author’s other works. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

Khadivi’s novel is a brilliant, mosaic‑style investigation of womanhood across cultures, generations and private histories. Told through vivid, intimate vignettes, it traces the complicated bonds between mothers and daughters, sisters, cousins and friends, using Heti’s grief and the shocking revelation of her mother’s hidden past as the emotional anchor.

The story moves with wit and warmth even as it confronts painful truths, and the chorus of women Heti turns to create a layered portrait of the secret selves women carry and the stories they inherit. They are contradictory, funny, sorrowful, and deeply human a

The novel’s fractured structure can seem to drift or get distracted, but the looseness is deliberate. Each fragment becomes one of the many disparate facets of womanhood whether real, imagined, inherited, or suppressed and the way Khadivi gathers them in the final movement makes them meaningful and gives the bills it's richness. What first feels scattered resolves into a cohesive, resonant whole, mirroring the layered, sometimes contradictory selves contained within every woman.

A moving, original celebration of connection, memory and the many lives contained within a single woman.

If you want, I can also craft a NetGalley‑ready version or a more concise blurb.

Powerful book through the eyes of different woman pre and post iranian revoultion and how female try to free of male domination and background is the daughter mourning her mother and a year before celebrate her life but does she really know her mother before her birth

What a gorgeous surprise this book was! The writing, the complexity of women’s lives touch, the subtle sense of humor, the insight of culture, all together brought to life a story I just wanted to read without a break.

Heti is someone’s daughter and now someone’s mother, who’s trying to cope with the loss of her dear mother. But not only the physical loss, also the perception smudged by some lies (according to the received pictures).
Once her perception of her mother gets bruised, Heti can’t stop questioning who was she after all? How can someone you thought you knew becomes a new version even after their death?
Through the entire journey of grief and uncertainty, Heti starts to understand the full complexity of being a woman and the layers of personalities that makes them so intricate.
In a world of so many human types and struggles, being a woman is stil, in my eyes, the deepest and empowering experience.

My triggers
* Is your identity stripped from you once you found out some missing puzzle pieces of your past?
* Does toughness come through inheritance?
* Can we agree that sometimes religion and culture get lost into each other’s territory?
* Just because you are genetically related to your family, that doesn’t mean your soul belongs to them too.
* I hide behind sense of humour majority of times. Depressed? Laugh a bit. Too tired to cry? Laugh a bit. Someone died? Oh god, this is gonna sound morbid, but I have to laugh a bit.
* Astrology believer here with huge desire to learn more about it.
* No one adapts faster to any new situation than a woman.
* Loss and grief differ from human to human.
* Women are always regenerating and reinventing themselves, while men can easily live life in a straight line.