Sons and Other Flammable Objects

A unique, refreshing, and sometimes jarring book with a brilliant new voice. What struck me first is how humor and anger are so inextricably intertwined from page one of this "couldn't put it down" novel. Sometimes you literally don't know "whether to laugh or cry". This makes it both compelling and entertaining. This book is about a voyage on so many levels, much of it the kind of universal journey we are each taking in our own way; and yet, in this book, the trip is so engagingly culture-specific that you both empathize and learn some new perspective time and again. Most of all, this delightful book is about the intractable, maddening, and sometimes hilarious nature of human nature.

It had been a really long time since I read a book that made me laugh out loud. But while reading this book by Porochista Khakpour, I found myself carrying it with me everywhere I went for a week. Reading it whenever I had down time or when out eating lunch. Almost every time I found myself laughing out loud or setting the book down to marvel at the writer's ability to make me care about the characters. I fluctuated in feeling angry at the protaganist, worried for the father and hopeful for the mother. And in the end, the book didn't disappoint. I recommend this book to all readers who are in search of a new and unique voice that wraps wit and warmth in nearly every paragraph.

This book is, in a word, satisfying. The characters are whole and real and you'll feel as if you've met them in life and become close friends. The humor is sensitive, subtle, poignant, and there's even that touch of mystical synchronicity that is too often ignored in our supposedly (but not really) rational world. Seeds are planted early on, that, to the reader's delight, sprout and blossom in that "Ah, now I get it," kind of excitement. The book offers a rare glimpse at what it might be like to be a what sociologist Ruth Hill Useem called a "Third Culture Kid," negotiating two worlds that happen to be clashing and crashing all around you. As characters fall apart and put themselves back together and fall apart again, you'll giggle and weep all at once. Moving, excellent first novel. I'm looking forward to many more from the author.

I really enjoyed reading the Sons and Other Flammable Objects. Khakpoor creates her characters so strongly they stay with you long after reading the book. The author has a very strong humor, she makes the reader laugh at the time she has just broken his/her heart. It is a refreshing novel well worth the time to read.

I've been reading a lot of just-in novels, and usually walk away like a cat: ambivalent, sorta hungry, and of course retaining no long-term memory. Not so with "Sons and Other Flammable Objects." Porochista Khakpour has answered some inner clarion call with this megawatt diamond, which she scrapes across the surface of the pane we've erected to keep the world out. But in it comes, and here, suddenly, is a family not conveniently handicapped from mother or father-loss, and does not sublimate the issues of one child into another. There are two parents and one child, and Khakpour's entelechy reveals the crucible of this trinity...But in which, of course, the fourth wall is Iran. There is Darius, the father, who is "desperately annexed to his work world to add some dimension beyond father" and Lala, the mother, who is faced with a proto-Posh Spice existence in the shadow of her brooding husband and Xerxes, her mercurial, I Dream of Jeannie-obsessed son. Lala's surreal and occasionally crass experiences "making nice" beyond the confines of her Pasadena domecile are painful and realistic. After she survives a night out with her new posse, Lala feels " grateful to be alive in the night, even if it be with these strange and maybe ultimately undesirable people, but people nonetheless, and people who had some investment in her, something, she sensed." Though Khakpour is the kind of writer who nails the description of being "deep in the type of tipsy that demanded everyone be tipsier," Khakpour herself is not this kind of host. She is not going to flambe you with her insights--they won't kick you out of the story, you won't get lost--but she's not going to cover them up when she leaves them eviscerated on your doorstep. Whites of eyes are "two lockets of white slime" and then there is "the toxic sh-t of adventure" and the dessicated Southern Californian life, with Beverly Hills and its "pathetic glittering length." Khakpour is especially damning to the gasoline soul of Los Angeles--she's as harsh as anyone since Cintra Wilson in "Colors Insulting to Nature"--but with precision and in a way that perfectly fits how her characters' malaise so often has to do with their physical locales. This is just what people do: they damn the walls around them if they aren't able to directly address the traumas that deposited them there. She is so thoroughly married to each character in the estranged but still suffocating and insular Adam family, and the ease with which she shifts from one to the next--not to mention from one plot point or earthly coordinate--is masterful. I don't know what else to say. You have to read this book.