The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

Sumptuous imagery and a modern sensibility (despite a preponderance of flowery language and schematic female bonding and male bullying) make this a winning debut. With journalistic clarity, Amirrezvani describes how to make a carpet knot by knot, and then sell it negotiation by negotiation, guiding readers through workshops and bazaars. Teetering on poverty and shame, the girl weaves fantasies for her temporary husband's pleasure and exchanges tales with her beleaguered mother until, having mastered the art of making and selling carpets under her uncle's tutelage, she undertakes to free her mother and herself.

The only marriage proposal now in the offing is a three-month renewable contract with the son of a horse trader. Her fascination with rug making is a pastime they indulge only for the interim, but her father's untimely death prompts the girl to travel with her mother to the city of Isfahan, where the two live as servants in the opulent home of an uncle-a wealthy rug maker to the Shah. Forced to leave their village, the woman and her mother travel to the beautiful city of Isfahan, where they are taken in by an uncle, a wealthy carpet designer, and his unsympathetic wife.

In Iranian-American Amirrezvani's lushly orchestrated debut, a comet signals misfortune to the remote 17th-century Persian village where the nameless narrator lives modestly but happily with her parents, both of whom expect to see the 14-year-old married within the year. Anita Amirrezvani has written a sensuous and transporting first novel filled with colors, tastes, and fragrances of life in seventeenth-century IsfahanAmirrezvani clearly knows and loves the ways of old Iran, and brings them to life with the cadences of a skilled story-spinner. THE BLOOD OF FLOWERS is a mesmerizing historical novel about a young Iranian woman whose destiny changes on the sudden death of her father.

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani