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Book Review :: The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Sanam Mahloudji’s debut novel follows three generations of Iranian women: Elizabeth, the grandmother; Seema and Shirin, her daughters; Bita and Niaz, Seema and Shirin’s daughters, respectively. Because of the Iranian revolution, the family becomes split, with Seema, Shirin, and Bita moving to the United States, leaving Elizabeth and Niaz in Iran. They were an important, wealthy family in Iran, mainly due to their tracing their lineage back to an ancestor they refer to as the Great Warrior.

One of the main themes of the novel, though, is the false narratives the family has been telling themselves. They have spent so much time looking to the past, as well as hiding the truth about various parts of their past, that they haven’t developed healthy relationships in the present. Thus, much of the novel is an unraveling of the stories they’ve told themselves, which have prevented them from seeing each other (and their family, in general) as they really are.

The larger conflict in the novel that brings everybody together and into tension is a legal case involving Shirin. She’s the most over-the-top character, flaunting the family’s wealth and believing Persians in the U.S. should still care about their family. An undercover police officer propositions her, believing her to be a prostitute, and she jokingly plays along with him before throwing a drink on him. Bita, who is in law school at the time, tries to help her aunt. Elizabeth and Niaz travel to the U.S. near the end of the novel as the trial approaches, leading to a number of revelations about the family.

The more important conflicts are the interpersonal ones, as each character has to figure out who they want to be and how they want to live the rest of their lives. Elizabeth reflects on her marriage and the man she once loved, but whom she set aside. Shirin has to come to grips with how others perceive her and how she presents herself. Bita and Niaz have the most to decide, as they are young women in very different situations. Bita is in law school because she thinks she needs to live up to some ideal that her mother couldn’t, while Niaz lives under the oppressive Iranian regime, trying to rebel where she can. Ultimately, the novel is about women trying to figure out how to live in relationship with one another, learning how to be mothers and daughters.

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji. Scribner, March 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Isabela’s Way by Barbara Stark-Nemon

Isabela’s Way by Barbara Stark-Nemon book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

During the Spanish Inquisition (1492 and 1834), the Catholic Church targeted Jews, Muslims, female herbalists and healers, and, later, Protestants for expulsion from Spain and Portugal. The goal, writes author Barbara Stark-Nemon in her introduction to Isabela’s Way, was the consolidation of power by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.

By all accounts, the Inquisition was brutal, and Stark-Nemon writes that following an expulsion edict issued by Spain in 1492, many Spanish Jews emigrated to Portugal, where for approximately 100 years, “New Christians” — Jewish converts to Catholicism, sometimes called Conversos or Marranos — evaded the Inquisitors. But peace was always tentative.

For 14-year-old Isabela de Castro Nunez, the life she’d known as a Converso ended when, in 1605, the Bubonic Plague hit the small town of Abrantes, Portugal, where she’d grown up. This was because the Church blamed New Christians for the spread of the deadly disease.

It’s a tense setup. Compounding this, Isabela is grappling with her mother’s death and her father’s prolonged absence to promote his business and political interests, leaving her feeling both abandoned and alone. Add in the looming political repression directed at her community, and it is not surprising that Isabela, her friend David, and his sisters listen when advised to flee their homeland for the presumed safety of France.

Stark-Nemon’s recreation of their fictional journey — sometimes traveling together and sometimes traveling separately — is filled with intrigue, violence, love, and the kindness of strangers. Moreover, a beautifully imagined network of clandestine safe houses comes to life, and we see Isabela, already renowned for her intricate embroidery, mature as she embarks on this harrowing journey.

Isabela’s Way is a tale of resilience in which good overcomes evil. All told, the novel is a vivid depiction of resistance and a powerful indictment of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and scapegoating. It’s a damn good story.

Isabela’s Way by Barbara Stark-Nemon. She Writes Press, September 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The unnamed narrator of Bradley’s debut novel, The Ministry of Time, has recently received a promotion within The Ministry, moving from the Languages department to serve as a bridge for a new expat. However, her newly arrived charge is not new to the country, as he was born in England, but new to the time period. The Ministry has discovered a time door, and they’ve used it to bring a handful of people — who were about to die in their lifetimes — into the present to see how they assimilate.

Thus, she spends most of her time with Graham Gore, who should have died in an Arctic expedition in the nineteenth century that went terribly wrong, helping him to adapt to twenty-first century life. They meet up with other bridges and expats at various times, some of whom adjust better than others. The narrator makes it clear early on that readers shouldn’t bother trying to understand the logic of time travel, advice that is always worthwhile when reading any book that involves it.

One of the reasons the narrator has her job is because her mother was a refugee from Cambodia, so leaders in The Ministry think she will work well in such a situation. However, she reveals herself to be rather naïve about the realities of her job. There are other people who are interested in the expats, leading to the narrator’s not knowing whom to trust, as she doesn’t truly understand the situation she has found herself in. She also struggles to understand Graham, and he can’t comprehend her, either, as their class and race divisions complicate their relationship beyond the obvious time differences.

Bradley uses time travel to ask questions about history, but more about history as a narrative that people construct to help provide them with purpose and meaning, as well as to control others or their world. The narrator comes to understand that she has defined others without understanding them, shaping narratives about them and herself that lead her to make a number of poor decisions. The ending leaves the future open, though, as the narrator is learning how to revise the narratives she’s crafted.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Avid Reader Press, April 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer by Chad Sanders

How to Sell Out by Chad Sanders book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

Chad Sanders lays out his premise in the opening line of the opening chapter of his book: “This is my last time writing about race,” a line that echoes Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Sanders takes a different approach to come to some similar and relevant conclusions, as he talks about the trades he has to make in order for (mostly) white executives to listen to him and greenlight his projects.

Sanders works in the entertainment industry, as well as in writing, and he spends a significant part of the book talking about the unpaid or underpaid work he has done in order to try to make the connections he needs in order to succeed. Much of that work involves talking about race, almost always including racial trauma. The parts of the book where he focuses on that part of his career mirror Danzy Senna’s recent novel Colored Television, with its portrayal of a Black woman trying to break into television writing.

Sanders also draws on his experience in Silicon Valley, which is strikingly similar to Hollywood, as well as conflict within the African American community, such as the debate over the Jack and Jill organization. By the end of the work, he reiterates that this will be his last time writing about race. However, he admits, “Unless I need the money again,” as he recognizes the realities of the world, even while critiquing them.

How to Sell Out: The (Hidden) Cost of Being a Black Writer by Chad Sanders. Simon & Schuster, February 2025.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer book cover image

Review by Kevin Brown

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s most recent book, is a long essay, more of a meditation on the serviceberry than an argument. Honestly, though, it is not even about the serviceberry, as she uses that as a means to talk about, as her subtitle puts it, Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. However, her book is about much more than that, as she spends a substantial amount of time talking about gift economies and what that would look like in the twenty-first century world.

Kimmerer looks around the world as it currently is and finds a number of those types of gift economies already in existence. For example, in one section of the book, she uses quick examples of people taking somebody out to dinner or passing a stroller on to somebody else who needs it or another person who makes too much lasagna and shares it with a neighbor. In fact, Kimmerer often gets her serviceberries from a neighbor who grows and sells them, as that neighbor allows people to come and pick them for free.

She also uses larger examples, such as libraries and public roads or Scandinavian countries with a much higher tax base, but a much higher happiness index score, as well. Kimmerer pulls from her Indigenous roots and examines how various tribes have dealt with land management, including agreements to share lands between nations, recognizing that all benefit from the resources, so all should help care for them.

In a time where polarization seems not only to be the norm, but also to be widening in the United States (and a number of other countries around the world), a problem only reinforced by the widening wealth gap, Kimmerer reminds readers that there are other ways to be in the world. Not only that, she reminds us that those ways already exist, if only we take the time to notice them.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Scribner, November 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites

Book Review :: Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen

Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

From earliest childhood, memoirist Marty Ross-Dolen, a now-retired child psychiatrist, knew that her mother’s life had been marked by something she could only glimpse, but which manifested as a sadness and sense of loss that nothing could fix. As she came of age, she learned the reason: her mother, Patricia [called Patsy] the second of five children, had been orphaned in 1960 when she was fourteen. A plane carrying her parents – the executives at Highlights for Children Magazine – had been flying to a meeting in New York City to discuss expanded newsstand placement when a collision between their commercial jet and another plane left no survivors. This abrupt end to life as she knew it catapulted Patsy and her siblings from their midwestern home into the home of relatives in Texas. Although they were well cared for and well-treated, from that moment on, a gaping absence hovered over every aspect of Patsy’s life.

Likewise for daughter Marty, who feared upsetting her mom by asking too many questions about the people whose photos stared at her from the living room mantlepiece. Still, she wanted to know more about her maternal lineage, so she started digging. The result, Always There, Always Gone, involved fourteen years of research, including the perusal of thousands of letters – miraculously saved by family and Highlights archivists – between Ross-Dolen’s grandmother, Mary Martin Myers, and her business associates and relatives before her death at age thirty-eight.

The result is a genre-bending memoir, offering readers fragments that Ross-Dolen calls “wisps,” a blend of conventional narrative, erasure poetry, imagined conversations between her and her grandmother, and family photographs. Moving, if somewhat enigmatic, the memoir is an emotionally rich interrogation of the legacy of grief on people who are both directly and indirectly impacted by tragedy. A wise and thoughtful addition to our understanding of the long-term effects of trauma and its transmission from parent to child.

Always There, Always Gone by Marty Ross-Dolen. She Writes Press, May 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: US Constitution 101 by Tom Richey and Peter Paccone

US Constitution 101 by Tom Richey and Peter Paccone book cover image

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

In US Constitution 101: From the Bill of Rights to the Judicial Branch, Everything You Need to Know about the Constitution of the United States, authors Richey and Paccone, both teachers, provide readers with a concise, anecdotally rich account of how America’s most foundational document evolved to become “the world’s oldest, functioning written Constitution.” Influenced by Hammurabi’s Code in Mesopotamia, the Greek system of demokratia, and the European Magna Carta, US founders struggled to create unity among the original 13 colonies while simultaneously granting each locale some autonomy. This pattern persists today (seen, for example, in the diverse state abortion laws that followed the 2022 Dobbs decision and in policies that govern the voting rights of convicted felons.)

Eighteenth-century contention is writ large throughout the book – regarding immigration, slavery, women’s suffrage, taxation, and declarations of war — and showcases the compromises and concessions of James Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Moreover, tensions over ratification of the newly-drawn Constitution, which required approval by nine states, are palpably reported and readers become privy to arguments between those who favored federal cohesion and those who favored state’s rights. Accommodation, Richey and Paccone write, “to ensure that none of the branches of government can gain a decisive advantage over the others,” led to a bicameral legislature, with strict policies regarding Presidential veto power and the appointment of federal judges, cabinet members, and ambassadors.

In addition, coverage of church-state separation, freedom of speech and assembly, prior restraint of media, and gun rights give the book added heft and contemporary relevance. What’s more, a smattering of fun facts enliven the prose: Readers learn that gerrymandering, for one, is named for Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, whose administration created a salamander-shaped district that critics dubbed the gerrymander. Who knew?

US Constitution 101 is an entertaining and extremely-readable resource, a guide to US governance for middle school and older readers. It answers a host of questions and explains the rationale for the state-by-state patchwork that makes many policies both complex and varied.

US Constitution 101: From the Bill of Rights to the Judicial Branch, Everything You Need to Know about the Constitution of the United States by Tom Richey and Peter Paccone. Adams Media, Simon & Schuster, September, 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Book Review :: The Future by Naomi Alderman

The Future by Naomi Alderman book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The Future, Naomi Alderman’s latest novel, is set in a near-future America that’s dominated by three tech companies: Fantail, Anvil, and Medlar. Those companies are a clear combination of social media sites (ranging from Facebook to TikTok), Apple, and Amazon, and their three leaders echo attributes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs.

I would like to say that the fictional companies are doing far more damage to Alderman’s world than their real-life inspiration, but I could only say that for certain because Alderman lets readers know what her CEOs are actually up to. They’re preparing for the end of the world, as was Martha Einkorn — who was raised in a cult that focused on preparing for the end of the world, but who has become the assistant for the CEO of Fantail — and Lai Zhen, a survivalist who’s become famous thanks to her online presence.

They meet and begin a relationship that is complicated by the billionaires’ seeming desire to bring about the end of the world as they know it. Alderman’s satire of our technology-obsessed world and the egos that run it is spot on, but she also creates characters worth caring about.

Readers won’t just want the world to continue because they want to see the tech leaders lose, but because they want Martha and Lai Zhen to live on.

The Future by Naomi Alderman. Simon and Schuster, November 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.