Book Review: The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali

The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali

Book title: The Lion Women of Tehran
Author: Marjan Kamali
Genre: Historical fiction
Published: July 2, 2024
327 pages
My rating: 5/5

“Someday, you and me – we’ll do great things. We’ll live life for ourselves. And we will help others. We are cubs now, maybe. But we will grow to be lionesses. Strong women who make things happen.”

Seven-year-old Elaleh “Ellie” Soltani’s comfortable middle-class life is upended by the unexpected death of her father when she and her mother are forced to move to a poorer neighborhood. In school, she meets Homa Roozbeh, and the two girls become best friends to Ellie’s mother’s dismay. Together they play games and dream of becoming lion women of the first generation of working women in Iran. Opportunity allows Ellie to return to her earlier lifestyle, and memories of Homa fade, until years later Homa suddenly reappears in her life.

The Lion Women of Tehran is a historical fiction by Marjan Kamali. Told mostly from Ellie’s point of view with a few chapters from Homa’s perspective, this coming-of-age story follows the two Iranian girls from the early 1950s, when Iran was modernizing, to the early 1980s and the aftermath of the Islamic revolution.

Ellie and Homa become friends at school but after a few years of friendship they lose touch with each other. When they meet again at seventeen, Ellie has changed and become a bit of “mean girl” – beautiful and popular. I expected there to be more tension and conflict between the two main characters when they met again, but Homa simply hugs Ellie, and they are suddenly friends like they used to be. On the one hand, I liked how their friendship was portrayed, but at the same time, I felt that Ellie’s jealousy of Homa was never fully explored. I also didn’t find it believable that during the seven or so years that Ellie and Homa were not in contact, someone as extroverted and friendly as Homa didn’t develop friendships with any other girls. She simply drops into Ellie’s life as if nothing had happened in the years between.

I’m also not sure if this book followed the right main character. Homa was the more driven and active person, although she didn’t have much personality aside from being a loyal friend and a fierce activist. Ellie, on the other hand, was more passive and quite naive and self-centered. She didn’t have much character development either, at least not during the main narrative. It seems that whatever development she had, it happened between the penultimate chapter and the epilogue.

Speaking of the epilogue, I understand that the author wanted to add a reference to the Mahsa Amini protests that began while she was writing the novel, but the listing of events that happened to the main characters between 1982 and 2022 was rather boring and not an organic way of presenting the information – I doubt anyone would write a letter like that.

I may have expected a book about a woman resisting both Iran's monarchy and the Islamic revolution to have more drama and conflict, but this was a rather quiet read. The writing style is simple, and quite often the only insight we got into the characters were the clothes they were wearing. Despite the few minor flaws that prevented this book from being a more interesting read, I enjoyed this book a lot. I loved the constancy of the main character’s friendship, and this is definitely a historic women’s fiction worth reading. After some hesitation over how to rate this book, I ended up giving it five stars.