This first novel by Iranian-American author Eslami started slow for me. We kept changing scenes, moving between past and present, and nothing seemed to be happening. However, it’s one of those books that sneak up on you and suddenly you don’t want to stop reading. In the end, you find yourself in tears, saying, “this is so beautiful.” It’s layered, it’s full of insights about Iranian culture, and the characters are so real you want to hug them all. Protagonist Jasmine Fahroodi has just finished four years of college but didn’t graduate due to a last-term rash of bad grades. Her parents insist that since she didn’t graduate, they must now arrange a marriage for her. She resists as one candidate after another comes to dinner. Meanwhile, she struggles to figure out what to with her life, now that her dreams of a career using her double majors of zoology and biology seems unlikely. On top of this, she searches to find the man inside her stern, quirky immigrant father who has closed himself off to everyone. Bone Worship follows Jasmine, a college dropout whose parents are determined to find a husband for her. She has no intention of going through with this arrangement, but begrudgingly she goes along with it almost as an experiment—to prove her parents wrong. She retreats into books, finds a job at the zoo doing poop ‘n scoop, and sabotages her father’s attempts to find a mate for her. She envies her brother, Uri, an adventurer who escapes home, but unlike him she is drawn to her remote Iranian father and her over-sharing American mother who had married for love. Disappointed in love, her parents only want security for Jasmine. The novel moves poetically into her father’s past as a boy in Iran, as Jasmine struggles to understand her father and his hardness, which has become her own. Along the way, she meets an unlikely suitor, a broken man who becomes whole with her even as she refuses to love him back. Bone Worship is a surprising and funny story about about the unpredictable nature of love.
What do You think about Bone Worship (2010)?
Slightly uncomfortable foray into a partially disconnected family, but with a possible happy ending.
—hovavle
I've pre-ordered this book and I can't wait to read it!
—reading_rad
