After the narrator's father dies suddenly, she and her mother are forced to travel to Isfahan and beg relatives to take them in. They are grudgingly welcomed as domestic help into the household of her father's half-brother Gostaham, an esteemed carpet designer, who reluctantly allows the young woman to assist him in his business after appraising her skill, an opportunity that will surely help her and her mother get back on their feet.

This book was all right, but it certainly didn't compare with Equal of the Sun, which was breathtaking and the first of Amirrezvani's books I read a number of years ago. I questioned some of protagonist's choices and found her almost unbelievably naïve and foolish, even for her young age. There was also a great deal of unhappiness balanced with very little true joy so that as a whole it felt rather heavy and I wanted to like it more than I actually did. ( )

this was surprisingly compelling when i think about what i usually care about in a story. for some reason, the carpet making was fascinating to me, even as i don't really feel that i learned much about it. but i kind of feel like i could have read about that forever. i was so absorbed in the story that i didn't even notice that the main character wasn't named until over 1/3 of the way through, and then it was easily forgotten again. but i really like this aspect, maybe not quite for the reason the author meant, but because of how anonymous women are when covered from head to toe in a chador. how they are seen for their separate body parts and not who they are, like an unnamed narrator can be, but how we see how much more there is to her.

i really liked the interspersing of the folktales and oral stories passed down; it worked really well here. this was a really interesting look at an iran hundreds of years ago, and what life was like for a segment of the population. the idea of the temporary marriage, the sigheh, was particularly interesting, and i can see how it can both really help and really hurt someone, often at the same time. ( )

Ventana abierta a un mundo tan lejano como desconocido, rica en fascinantes detalles sobre la vida cotidiana en la Persia del siglo XVII, esta novela cuenta la historia de una joven audaz y perseverante que logra transformar su vida gracias a su extraordinario don para confeccionar alfombras. A los catorce años, tras la prematura muerte de su padre, la protagonista ve cómo sus posibilidades de matrimonio se desvanecen, lo que la obliga a marcharse del pueblo con su madre y trasladarse a la capital, Isfahán, donde un pariente lejano las acoge como sirvientas. Sin dote y condenada a depender de la caridad ajena, la joven huérfana no tendrá más remedio que aceptar un sigué, un contrato de matrimonio temporal, pero gracias a la ayuda de su tío, diseñador de alfombras en la corte del sah, tendrá ocasión de descubrir los secretos del antiguo arte de tejer alfombras, su tradición, el significado de sus dibujos y el origen vegetal de sus vibrantes colores.

In het begin heeft het even geduurd voor het boek me "beet", maar daarna vond ik het prachtig. ( )

I wasn't sure I was going to like this as much as I did...for some reason, I thought there were going to be more fantastical elements included in the story (apparently I'm not very good at reading plot synopses...), and I eventually figured out this was just going to be straight up historical fiction. Ha! And for an audiobook, a format of which I'm still trying to become a good listener, I was even more surprised as the plot moved relatively slowly. It was all on account of reader Shohreh Aghdashloo's rich delivery that I swooned over the craft of weaving and the unnamed narrator's awed culture shock of acclimating to Isfahan. I really appreciated how strong and flawed the narrator was and how believable she was written as a teenager experiencing young marriage and class divisions particular to 17th-century Iran. Two thumbs up!

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Read Harder: Historical fiction set before 1900. ( )