serinlea reviewed on 3/21/2011

Helpful Score: 4

This memoir turned out to be much more about Lolita than it was about Tehran. We get fascinating glimpses of these women's lives -- including a night where Nafisi sits in the hallway outside her children's bedroom, preparing a lecture while Iraqi bombs fall. But these moments of reality, of war and oppression, are sparsely interspersed between lengthy passages of the author's commentary about the books her students were reading. I wanted to hear more about her students' reactions to the works, or of the struggles they faced outside the book club, but I kept turning the page to discover more E. Lit lecturing. I'm sure it didn't help that it's been at least ten years since I read "The Great Gatsby", but honestly, if I'd wanted lit crit, there are a lot of other books I could've picked up instead.

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