[In the following review, the critic praises Rabinyan's mixing of elements of a fairy tale with facts about Jewish life in Persia in Persian Brides.]

First novelist Rabinyan's earthy and sensual fairy tale[, Persian Brides,] is filled with stories of love affairs, curses, child brides, evil husbands, marriages, demons, violence, and childbirth. At the turn of the century in the Jewish quarter of Omerijan, a small Persian town, 15-year-old Flora Ratoyan, hugely pregnant and deserted by her cloth-merchant husband, is comforted by her orphaned cousin, Nazie. At age 11, Nazie herself is eagerly awaiting her own wedding to Flora's brother, Moussa. Over the course of three days in the lives of the cousins, Rabinyan introduces a colorful pageant of other inhabitants of the village. These include Miriam Hanoun, Flora's mother, who had to appease the cats of the village in order to have her babies live more than a few days. Rabinyan mixes these fairy tale elements with information about local wedding ceremonies, food, childbirth, and the sorry and constrained role of women and female children in a society far away from ours in both time and place.