I love this author and this is the second book I've read by her. She has a wonderful sense of humor and I like the way she thinks. This book gave me a wonderful insight of people from Persia, now Iran, and reminded me of my good friend Zohreh, also from Persia. It's refreshing to know that people from Iran are not that different from us after all, and I enjoyed hearing about her family, and especially her father, but also her mother, her aunts and uncles.
I enjoyed the first book, Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas, so I was very happy to have the chance to read this one. As with the first one, this book tells snippets from her life, though this book focuses more on her later years than her earlier ones the way that Funny in Farsi did. Also, this book did have a number of laugh out loud moments, though I felt there were also a few stories that were on the serious side comparatively (not that it took away from the book at all, just noting a comparison). I really enjoy the way that Firoozeh Dumas paints pictures with her words. I could see her father and uncles huddled around the TV yelling at "The Price is Right," just as I could see her standing outside her front door dressed in her red PJs scowling at the dogs she thought were pooping on her lawn. She writes in a way that allows the reader to see everything from inside her memory banks. She is also quite respectful of the cultures she writes about and as with Funny in Farsi, she is very respectful of her subjects (mainly family members) so that you know you are laughing with them as an insider to a family joke or family story, and not laughing at them. I hope that she writes more of these books!
I do have a favorite new quote as a result of this book: "Ever since we arrived in the United States, my classmates kept asking me about magic carpets. 'They don't exist,' I always said. I was wrong. Magic carpets do exist, but they are called library cards."
