The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali (2024): A Review
Author: Marjan Kamali
Publication Year: 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Pages: 327
Source: audiobook @storytel.tr
Genre: literary fiction, coming-of-age, historical fiction, Persian Literature
Opening Sentence: I stood on the lacquered floor—a small woman in black with a rectangular name badge on my chest. My coiffed, contented look was calculated so I’d appear not just satisfied but quietly superior. In America, I’d learned the secret to being a successful salesperson was to act like one of the elite, as if spritzing perfume on customers’ blue-veined wrists were doing them a favor.
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali is a deeply somber story about two friends whose bond is tested by class, political upheaval, and migration. This book was incredibly hard for me to get through. Even if it hadn’t echoed my own history, I know I would have cried for Ellie and Homa. But because their story felt so close to home, I found myself in tears before the tragedies even unfolded.
History in textbooks always felt distant, like it belonged to someone else. But when a novel puts faces and names to those events—when the characters’ pain mirrors your country’s collective traumas and memories —everything feels raw and personal.
Ellie and Homa’s friendship began in the shadows of Tehran’s poorer neighborhoods, a rare bright spot in a world that kept pushing them apart. Class, geography, and the turmoil of their country tore them from each other again and again, sometimes in ways that felt final. Yet the connection between them endured, even across years of silence and loss.
One friend finds a way to move forward, carrying guilt she can never quite let go of; the other is trapped by years of trauma and resistance, living in a world that never feels safe. What struck me most was how all the pain of a nation was distilled into their personal suffering. When they finally reunite, it’s not just for themselves but for the next generation—to offer hope far from the land that broke them. Homa’s fight for dignity and freedom lingered with me long after I finished the book.
If I could, I’d give this book ten stars. It forced me to remember the darkness endured by women who fought or simply survived in silence. The characters are so vivid and real that I found myself mourning their losses even before they happened, knowing too well when and where disaster would strike. There is a heaviness to this story, a quiet grief for the lives shaped by tragedy that the world so often ignores, and the world still ignores because it does not benefit them.
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