SOURCE: A review of Persian Brides, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 245, No. 2, January 12, 1998, p. 45.

[In the following review, the critic asserts that in Persian Brides, "Rabinyan's brisk, fetching prose expertly summons a long-vanished land and renders it dazzling and delicious."]

It may be true, as Tolstoy wrote, that all happy families resemble one another, but it would be next to impossible to find a family anything like the Ratoryans, the 19th-century Jewish clan engagingly depicted in this first novel[, Persian Brides]—or a writer who could conjure them up more vividly than Israeli journalist Rabinyan. The members of this passionate, superstitious family inhabit a traditional Persian village where, for women, marriage and childbirth are paramount and the news that a girl has begun menstruating is disseminated by carrier pigeon. Flora—voluptuous, adorable, foolish and very pregnant at 15—casts spells every day and sings magic songs every night until her...