Author: Nadia Hashimi
Narrator: Mozhan Marno
What makes a book worth reading for you? I likely would have never picked up Sparks Like Stars except for one reason—My mom was reading it for her book group, and I have gotten into the habit of reading along, which gives us a regular topic to chat about when I call each week. Otherwise, I might have run away from the title—“Sparks Like Stars”? I don’t know, it simply strikes me as something gooshy, maybe preteen… and this book really isn’t that. Written by Nadia Hashimi, an Afghan-American doctor/novelist (dang, how does a doctor find the time to write novels?), Sparks Like Stars is the second book I’ve read as part of my book-club journey with my mother, with the first being The Pearl that Broke its Shell. Both books deal with Afghanistan history and young women navigating in and out of the country. This time, the focus is on a young Afghan girl caught in the middle of the Saur Revolution, manages to escape, and the crazy aftermath. The novel is often deeply moving and eye-opening for those unaware of recent Afghani history, though the plot is built on such radical implausibilities that the tale can come across as a bit eye-rolling.
Note that I will be discussing some spoilers here. I don’t want to spoil everything, but if you don’t want any spoilers at all, skip to the end.
The general set up is that Sitara Zamani, a ten-year-old Afghan girl living in Kabal, is living the high life (relatively speaking) with her father as the right-hand man to the president, Sardar Daoud. Everything goes south when a coup is staged, her family is murdered, and she barely escapes alive under the auspices of a guard she thinks killed her family. After a series of complicated misadventures and barely-evaded capture, Sitara manages to escape the country under a new assumed name: Aryana. After a harrowing side trip through the US foster system, she is adopted by a foreign diplomat, and grows up to become a cancer surgeon—and one day (here is the big spoiler, though it’s mentioned even on the Goodreads page) in walks the guard, Shair, that saved her life and may have murdered her family. He has also escaped to the US, and now he needs her help to save his life. But can he also uncover her past?
For me I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot more than the second. Sitara’s emotionally-wrought escape from death and her ensuing rebellion against her captor, then her growing relationship with an odd-couple mother-daughter pair (one is an actor, the other a diplomat) give a real emotional bite to the story, and create a delicious tension to the hairbrained escape schemes and encounters that play out. When Sitara/Aryana arrives in the USA and is pawned off into a foster home run by a tyrannical Christian mother and her pedophile husband, the story felt derailed a bit.
But then the narrative jumps to Sitara’s adult life, and I felt a lot of disconnect at first. I was more interested in following young Sitara’s adaptation to the new culture than older Sitara’s jaded maturity and broken love life. Then, when Shair appears through the wildest cosmic coincidence on her doorstep, I had a serious flashback to A Little Princess (which I also read earlier this year) because that book, too, relies on a massive serendipity to resolve its character conflicts. With Sparks Like Stars, though, this act of fate is just the first of several that stream from the godlike pen of author Hashimi, and which pull Sitara through a painful-yet-liberating journey back to the world of her childhood.
The celestial fates theme seems deliberate, even with Sitara standing as a skeptic/irreligious individual. She comes from a Muslim background, and there are hints that a greater power is working in the shadows or operating in the heavens—Shair definitely interprets the fated reunion in such a way. The story doesn’t exist without the touch of God so to speak, but it feels a bit faked rather than fated, especially as other bits fall into perfect place, or Shair speaks in deliberate riddles to string the plot out longer. The contrivances pricked my annoyance.
Still, if you can swallow the artificial elements of the tale, Sitara goes through a torturous character arc, and it’s worth it to troop along for the ride. Her relationship with her adopted mother is rewarding and warm, and traitorous Shair might be my favorite character (other than his Yoda-like obtuseness) due to his complexity and tragedy. Hashimi’s writing is at turns poetic, powerful, tense, and flat, with some few passages clonking in my ears as narrator (and Iranian-American actress) Mozhan Marno dramatically reads (I just think a few places needed another editing pass). Marno does a fine job with the reading, strengthening the narrative with due narrative heft. I was wondering as I was listening to the book whether the narrator could speak the languages of the Afghanistan, as there are several phrases in the book spoken in Afghani tongues—and while Marno speaks Farsi (the official language of Iran), it’s not clear to me she can also speak Afghani languages well. But… since I don’t know either way, it doesn’t affect my enjoyment much.
Basically, it’s a pretty good book. And it was nice to talk about it with my mom. That’s about all I got for now 😊