Refuge
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
"An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other's wisdom and, ultimately, rescue. Meanwhile, refugees of all nationalities are flowing into Europe under troubling conditions. Wanting to help, but also looking for a lost sense of home, our grown-up transplant finds herself quickly entranced by a world that is at once everything she has missed and nothing that she has ever known. Will her immersion in the lives of these new refugees allow her the grace to save her father?"--Amazon.com
Reviews with the most likes.
This was definitely one I wanted to read based on that beautiful cover - something so appealing to me about it. Told from two perspectives, Niloo and her father, Bahman, about their perspectives on leaving Iran during the 1990s/early aughts and the immigrant experience in the U.S. (for Niloo as a child and young adult) and Europe (where Niloo lives as an adult, and across which Bahman visits his two grown children on four occasions).
This book, by nature of its subject matter, does include a good amount of the luck and frustration involved when attempting to emigrate (perhaps especially as this story is mostly set in a post-9/11 world), but moreso, this is a novel about a family, and its separation, and the ways that each of the characters attempts to find security, safety and happiness as they grow older.
With the two perspectives, you get this roundness of these characters over three decades. It's like, Bahman sees himself as this successful Iranian dentist who is comfortable being a big fish in a little pond, and Niloo sees him as someone she is embarrassed by and can't trust, an opium addict who can't get or stay sober, who abandoned her when she was a child by not following them to the U.S. like he had said he would.
There are a lot of beautiful things about Persian culture, finding your place among strangers, and accepting the things you can't change, like your family. A good family story. I enjoyed the audiobook, both the Bahman and Niloo narrators were good.
