Laleh Khadivi structures her novel around a single image that refuses to resolve: a younger version of Heti's recently deceased mother, veiled in black, machine gun slung over her shoulder, aimed at a group of handcuffed women in miniskirts. It arrives from an unknown sender. It does not arrive with an explanation. Khadivi's decision to withhold confirmation — was the mother a revolutionary enforcer or something more ambiguous? — is the book's central structural gamble, and it pays off. Heti is an Iranian-American accountant in Los Angeles. She has two daughters, a dead mother, an Iranian aunt who insists on a year of correct mourning, and now a set of photographs she cannot unknow. Khadivi doesn't let this premise tip into thriller mechanics. The book is organized as a series of vignettes across a year — soccer pitches, wholesale supermarkets, the set of a soft porn film where Heti is doing accounts — and the moral reckoning is conducted in these ordinary, often darkly comic spaces. The tone fluctuates deliberately: sardonic, analytical, occasionally grandiose, and back again. The most honest thing in the book is Heti's response to the photographs. She doesn't perform horror. She recognizes something. 'For the tiniest second I was weirdly reassured that my mother wasn't all manners and sweetness and that maybe we had more in common than I thought.' Khadivi earns this moment because she has built Heti as a woman drawn to questions of control — control over her clients' numbers, her daughters' futures, her own grief. The mother's violence is a mirror, not just a revelation. The novel's formal ambition — chapters named for planets and physics terms, a self-conscious shift between the domestic and what Khadivi calls the 'cosmic' — is its least reliable element. When it works, the metaphysical framing gives scale to Heti's interior freefall: the 'emotional gravity' pulling her toward Jupiter's vaporous atmosphere is an image that earns its abstraction. When it doesn't, the prose goes slack: 'At night, Heti's soul ranged and she followed.' That sentence does no work. Khadivi's best move is the novel's closing pivot. When Heti's daughter Zora announces her readiness to 'take hostages, or destroy oil tankers' for the climate cause, Khadivi positions this as a quiet structural rhyme with the grandmother's revolutionary violence — not an equation, but a question. The book does not let you decide the grandmother was simply a villain and Zora is simply a hero. It asks what conditions produce each, and whether daughters ever really see the logic operating in their own radicalism. That is a genuinely uncomfortable question, and Khadivi asks it without blinking.
