The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali – A Story of Friendship & Resilience

• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Pages: 327
• Date Published: July 2024
• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Readily available at my library? Not yet (February 2025), but ask for it wherever you get your book fix. I love supporting our independent bookstores, if in Baltimore, here’s my favorite shop, The Ivy Bookshop.
• Spoilers in this review? No. Well, not really. I share some of the emotions I felt at specific points, but I’ll let you encounter the details, I don’t want to selfishly hoard those feelings.

Why I wanted to read it & the format I read it in.

When the book club that I joined in late 2024 was experiencing an uncertain interim due to the host stepping down, I was compelled to quickly find another community that appreciates the sport of full immersion reading.

I found a group that was meeting within the week at a local restaurant, the book seemed intriguing, I was hooked. But the catch: I had 4 days to get the book & read it. Game on. I enjoy a fun challenge.

Since paperbacks are not available and my library doesn’t stock it yet, I purchased a hardcover version of The Lion Women of Tehran. Even though I’m going through an audiobook phase, this is a beautiful addition to my prolific book collection.

The backdrop is a tumultuous era in the Middle East, rife with complex topics of social class, war, culture, and societal views of women’s roles.

We meet adult Ellie at the beginning of the book and then we trace back to her childhood in the 1950s and watch her evolve and experience change and adversity. She befriends Homa, a young girl from a different economic background who has disparate passions and life goals.

Their friendship will experience many seasons, influenced by family dynamics, political turmoil, and betrayal.

How much and how well did the book provide a sense of a particular place, time, community, and/or culture?

The Lion Women of Tehran transported me back to my childhood, I envisioned our two protagonists, Ellie and Homa chalking a hopscotch grid, eating ice cream sandwiches, sharing a conspiratorial mocking of the consolation of strawberries and the benefit of peaches.

Ok, when you get to page 47, you’ll know what I mean on that last fragment. We see the simple pleasures of two young girls coming of age, the innocence and WE know, as readers, that the simplicity will be ruptured at some point. Isn’t it always?

Much of the book is set in Iran; I loved hearing of Persian traditions and customs, superstitions, and family lineage that shaped the characters. And of the brave individuals that fought for a shattered country, doing what they felt was right for themselves and their families.

This is one of the best historical fiction books I’ve read, I couldn’t put it down. This made driving somewhat hazardous, but I persevered. I’ve heard that the way you face adversity says alot about you.

I think many women would crave a friendship similar to the one that bonded Ellie and Homa.

Homa and I would’ve been very good friends, sharing mutual admiration of our life choices, she would’ve encouraged me to pursue my dreams earlier, I would’ve worried about her safety while simultaneously supporting her beliefs.

How deeply did the book go into mining the depths of the human experience?

While reading the book, I highlighted passages that resonated with me and scrawled my predictions of where I felt a particular scene was headed in the margins.

I would jot down an emotion that Marjan triggered. At one point, it looked like I had dipped a page in turmeric, it glistened a lovely golden shade.

On page 258, I yelled at Ellie, and at the bottom of the next page, I started crying. By page 272, I started crying again. Now, these weren’t necessarily sad tears, but THIS IS WHAT MARJAN EVOKED.

I love it when a book moves me this much.

This book made we wonder why people choose to stay or choose to leave their home countries when daily life is so dangerous.

I thought of how brave it is when people choose to stay and fight for their beliefs as well as those that venture into the unfamiliar to start over, perhaps learning a new language, new customs, a new occupation, not being recognized for your prior achievements, and leaving friends and family.

I grew to love these characters, to feel their joy, their pain.

Stickiness – how tightly did the book keep me glued to the story?

If I had to describe how glued I was to the story, I might as well be describing an industrial-engineered epoxy.

I was captivated by the lives of the characters. I had been in middle school at the time of the Iran hostage crisis at the American embassy.

As a little girl, I didn’t understand the hostility or what was happening. Ellie and Homa didn’t either.

This book reignited my interest and curiosity about this period in history. I researched the details of the Cinema Rex fire along with the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini.

I followed the plight of young women that went from having certain freedoms and liberties to being entrapped in a fundamentalist and strict world, where allowing a wisp of hair to be visible put you at risk of an unimaginable punishment.

Click here for more information on the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Click here for information on Persian culture and social norms.

How well did the descriptions enhance the story?

Marjan seamlessly wove beauty and tragedy throughout the story:

• The visual depiction of the noise and the merchants of the Grand Bazaar put me in a bustling market of colors and textures and primed my desire to haggle over fresh pomegranates and handmade crafts, sampling from random street vendors as I meander.
• At another point in the book I smelled fear, it presented itself in the combination of fried onions and mop water in the hallway of a tenement apartment building. Paint was peeling from the wall, my heart raced as knuckles rapped on the scarred wooden door, apprehensive of what will happen when the door opens.
• Imagining two young girls basking in the comfort and safety of a kitchen, being taught how to slice vegetables as a wooden spoon circulates at the stove, fragrant spices and the aromas of saffron and bergamot tease the air.

I felt that all five of my senses were piqued while reading this book. It’s beautiful inside and out. I added this book to my women’s fiction book recommendations that I gleefully share with others that have similar tastes in books.

The Lion Women of Tehran will undoubtedly become a sought after tome for book club reads in 2025 and the future.

My sister and I read this together (she’s in Florida, I’m in Maryland) in February 2025 and loved texting and calling each other with status updates of our individual reading experiences. While I had to speed-read the book to be able to discuss with my new book club cronies, I loved that she could cozy up with the book, her coffee or wine, and pace herself, savoring the prose.

The book has wonderfully short chapters that allows life to interrupt at intervals that are convenient to our reading.

Marjan Kamali is the award-winning author of three books, The Lion Women of Tehran is her most recent. She also wrote The Stationery Shop, a national and international bestseller, and Together Tea, a Massachusetts Book Award finalist.

Find out more about Marjan Kamali’s books and what she is up to here.

I reached out to The Ivy Bookshop, my favorite local bookstore and ordered another copy of this book so that I am prepared to gift it to a friend.

And while I’m there, I figured I’d pick up a copy of The Stationery Shop. I’ll share a book review with you when it’s ready!

About my categories

Note: The subheadings above (horizontality, verticality, stickiness, and literary richness) are the brainchild of Mark Morgan Ford, an author, entrepreneur, philanthropist, business leader.

He structures his book and film reviews with those categories. I LOVE his rating system; I was inspired to adapt my review structure similarly.

You can find Mark here; I highly recommend you visit his site; his writing is gorgeous and inspiring.

You may want to grab a beverage and a cigar so that you can comfortably settle in and be inspired by his prose. As a nonsmoker, might I recommend substituting a quarter sleeve of Caramel deLites® or Samoas®Girl Scout cookies for the stogie?

Fun fact: Mark and I worked together years ago; I had heard he may have blogged about my distinctive walk or maybe it was my cartwheeling in the executive offices of Agora Publishing. This is an unconfirmed rumor, but fun to muse about.