Life is like a maze. It takes mysterious twists and turns, has walls much too tall to peer over, and often includes a few dead ends. When we’re in the maze, we do not know where we are going next, nor where it ends. But, when we overcome the pressures of giving up, we often find that our path, full of seemingly impossible challenges, eventually leads us to restore what we once thought was lost.
Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop focuses on the timeless enigma of fate and destiny through the love story of protagonists Roya Joon and Bahman Aslan. In this captivating novel, Kamali discusses timeless themes that continue to weigh on us all. The novel takes place over nearly an entire century to capture the generational struggles of classism, misogyny, gender inequality, grief, immigration, and political unrest. The Stationery Shop is primarily written from a third-person perspective based on Roya’s point of view. However, Kamali structures the novel to include chapters that flash forward and backward in time to provide a multi-generational look into the lives of the other characters. This is one of my favorite elements of the novel’s form, as it creates exceptional foreshadowing and dramatic irony which adds to the prismatic nature of the tale.
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