[In the following review, Lowenthal, an American author, praises Rabinyan's authentic detail and rich prose in Persian Brides.]

Despite the near-microscopic scrutiny to which our politicians' love lives are currently subjected, we may still be astonished to encounter a culture in which ordinary girls' sexual intimacies are known by every neighbor, mothers probe their sleeping daughters' private parts to confirm the "family honor," and a girl's first menstruation is announced from the rooftops. Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli journalist, poet and playwright, has conjured precisely such a society in Persian Brides, her lush, lyrical and disturbing first novel. Set in a Jewish community in a village in turn-of-the-century Persia, the story contrasts the experiences and aspirations of two young women: Flora, a 15-year-old pining for her deadbeat husband, a cloth merchant who ditched her with "a baby in her belly and lice in her hair," and Flora's 11-year-old cousin, Nazie, desperate to achieve her menses so she can be wed to Flora's brother. Nazie and Flora's frantic longing for married life is artfully contrasted with the reality of what's in store for them: wives and mothers in their world are violently mistreated by their husbands, spat upon, even threatened with death for bearing female children. With unwaveringly authentic period detail, Rabinyan grounds her themes of sexual politics in scenes mingling exotic beauty and gritty horror. Only 23 when her book was published in Hebrew, she writes with the wise and leisurely assurance of a town bard recounting communal myths. In this translation by Yael Lotan, Rabinyan's marvelously digressive style and rich prose give the story the feel of a nightlong wedding feast. Persian Brides is an auspicious debut.