This is a powerful memoir of a young girl, growing up in the tumultuous revolutionary Iran in the mid 80’s, which sadly, once again we are witnessing these days the horrendous arrest and executions of many young men and women in Iran. The author chronicles her early childhood with her Bibi (grandmother) as well as her imprisonment at the age of eighteen on trumped-up political charges.
During her brutal incarceration in the women’s cell block of the Shiraz Adelabad Prison in the southern Iran, she was tortured and made to live in harsh over-crowded conditions among many other young women, mostly high school and university students. Her brother, Mohammad, only twenty-four, was on death row for participating in the anti-government protests and was labeled “anti-revolution”. The Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guard of Sepah imprisoned tens of thousands of students and executed many of them openly.
Nastaran was born between the traditional upbringings of a girl her age and the call of the modern world. Bibi mesmerized her granddaughter with countless stories, traditional prayers and simple, yet profound wisdom gleaned from a harsh life.
It is the contrast Nastaran paints between her relatively protected, if somewhat tangled, childhood and the nightmare of her time of suffering and torture in the Ayatollah’s prison that makes this memoir so compelling, all the while shedding lights on the current event in Iran and the brutality of the Iranian regime against the defenseless Iranian people who are simply fighting for the basic human rights and freedom.