Darya loves mathematics so much that she makes spreadsheets and graphs for each of her daughter's potential suitors. But Mina--still single at 25, unhappy in business school and longing to pursue her artistic dreams--wants her mother to stop the matchmaking. When an afternoon tea date with yet another potential husband ends in tears, Darya begins to question the effectiveness of her system, and Mina makes a bold decision. For the first time in 15 years, the two women return to Iran, to the city and the family they fled shortly after the Islamic Revolution. Marjan Kamali's debut novel, Together Tea, is the story of what they find there--both in the people they left behind, and in themselves.
Mina has always felt like an outsider, caught between the Iran of her family's past and the American culture of her teens and 20s. Darya, meanwhile, is proud of her children's and husband's success in the United States, but misses the social ties and the intellectual respect she enjoyed in Iran. Kamali deftly alternates between their perspectives, showing both sides of the cultural divide with grace and humor. She also weaves memories of life in Iran into the book's present-day narrative, underscoring the deep ambivalence both Darya and Mina harbor toward their home country: a place of beauty, warmth and color, but also of protests, bombs and danger.
Lighthearted but also deeply moving, Together Tea explores the intricate pattern of a mother-daughter relationship fraught with cultural expectation but undergirded by deep love and respect. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams