Persian Dreams follows the individual lives of family members across generations, exploring the intimate detail of life in Iran during this period. Through the loves and losses of the chracters and telling and retelling of the family's stories, the reader is allowed to experience Persian culture from inside.
From the architecture of the houses to the rules governing relationship between men and women, the texture of this rich culture permeates the book and interweave the realities of the time and place with the fictional lives of this family. Hightlighting the importance of the poetry in Persian culture, there are poems/songs throughout the novel which speak of the love, the tragedy, the joy that these chracter experienceover the years.
Speaking from a place of greatfamility with the culture, tabibzadeh takes the readers through time to experience
the changes in the culture from one generation to the next.
Through her character, she offers great insights into lives of women in this society and how the changes in the political climate have effected women's lives and roles over the years.
This tangle of facts and fiction resulting novel offers a glimpse at an Iran that is much deeper than the headlines and much broader than the preconceptions that dominate Western Media. The complexity of the Iranian Revelution is brought to life through characters who must make tough deceisions in dificult times, and who sufere the costs of imperfect solutions. Though the novel takes place iexclusively in the 20th century, this only delineates of how recently this culture
signifant changes. Yet there are also indications of how the past continues to inform the present and how stubbornly inchanging some cultural practices are, especially in the case of women who must struggle to find their place in islam and still be free to follow their own destinies.