Moon Trilogy
The MOON TRILOGY, made up of PERSIAN MOON, MOON CHILD and MOONLIGHT is a saga, a bicultural story that spans three generations of women as they meander through their lives, their paths colliding with reality.
The present protests in Iran propelled me to publish The Trilogy, honoring life, women and freedom. Women everywhere are seeking the right to have more choices available to them, and we support our sisters.
Against the backdrop of Iran’s changing social, religious and political tenor and controversial culture, the novels braid fiction with stories shared by houseguests as well as by clients, friends and family members who escaped the stronghold regime of the mullahs. The unique insights gleaned from my several travels through Iran add additional authenticity to the novels, each of which stands on its own so that the novels need not be read in sequence, though preferred.
The characters portrayed in theTrilogy will live with you. Their emotions will resonate with you, confirming the universality of human emotions.
Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the geographical, political, cultural, legal, and religious cues all throughout the three novels of the Trilogy with the International House at UCLA being the sole imagined addition to the story. All else is bona fide, offering the reader a voyage to an exciting story, borne in historical reality, and emerging from an authentic backdrop that resonates in human passion, pain, loving, loss and the ache for freedom.
Persian Moon~Layla’s Story
#Women
PERSIAN MOON gives ample space to the condition of women before the Islamic Revolution.
Born in Iran’s repressive culture, Layla Saleh embodies the submissive woman who does what is expected of her. She symbolizes the women of Iran, subjugated by a male-dominated culture. Layla, a “good Muslim girl,” travels to California to attend UCLA and is presented with the freedom to choose her lifestyle for the first time. The experience for ever changes her outlook on life. Unfortunately, she must pay the price for her actions, and forced to have a hymenoplasty, the barbaric practice of surgically creating a new hymen in a culture that reveres a female’s virginity at marriage. Handcuffed to Iran she aches to be free again. The story, with an ever- twisting and turning plot, filled with surprises, is told against the sweeping backdrop of Iran’s history, its changing politics and controversial culture.
This medieval practice propelled me to write PERSIAN MOON, in an effort to rip away the standing girdle of repression in a male-dominated society.
Moon Child~Jolie’s Story
#Life
MOON CHILD is devoted to the story of Jolie Gold, adopted in Texas and raised in Beverly Hills. Jolie is determined to lead her own life. She will be responsible for her mistakes and take credit for her tribulations. She is a free spirit who follows only her heart, accepting the responsibility of her decisions. She symbolizes the power we women can exert over our lives.
Moonlight
#Freedom
MOONLIGHT is devoted to the pursuit of freedom.
A gripping tale of survival, MOONLIGHT portrays the injustices perpetrated on women after the Islamic Revolution, when monstrous measures enacted by the religious ruling class and enforced by the Revolutionary Guards made an exposed ankle, a strand of hair or the sight of an arm reason for punishment. Almost overnight, Tehran, the city once known as, “the Paris of the Middle East,” was transformed into a reincarnation of a city in the Middle Ages. Iranians who had hoped for relief from the dictates of the monarchy were horrified to see their country thrown into the dark well of life ruled by mullahs who cared nothing of women and whose only goal has been, “to spread Islam around the world,” to quote Khomeini.
