I found the earlier chapters clearly defining love as “the will to nurture our own and others’ spiritual growth” really brilliant and challenging in a good way. Unfortunately I found the majority of the rest of the book incredibly repetitive and near nonsensical.

★★★☆☆ Unpleasant to read. Wong’s paints her recollections in lurid, sensational, and vindictive grotesqueness.

★★☆☆☆ I am definitely too old for this book (which skews on the young end of middle grade) and found it pretty boring with no stakes or real character development.

★★☆☆☆ TLDR: If you’re into romantic tropes, historical fiction, plot spanning an entire lifetime, and epistolary writing, you might be into this. Do not expect much by way of Iranian history, realism, suspense, dialogue, or character development.

★★★☆☆ My experience reading the book was one of constantly being taken out of the story by how alienated I felt from the experiences and concerns of Offred as a white woman written by a white woman.