Lena’s Reviews > Martyr! > Status Update

This book follows the story of Cyrus shams, who was born in Iran, two parents. His mother passed away when her airplane that was headed towards Qatar was shot out of the sky by an American naval ship. His father ended up taking Cyrus to America and was a chicken farmer. When growing up in America, Cyrus ended up having a bit of a challenging life, growing up as an Iranian immigrant in the US to a father who was a farmer, not making much money. He ended up getting into a lot of alcohol and drugs and sex. Later in the book he discovers that he wants his death to mean something and is basically contemplating suicide, so he wants to write a book about martyrdom and a bunch of different murders from different periods throughout history. One of his friends lets him know that an artist in Brooklyn is having an exhibition called death talk, because she unfortunately is passing away from late stage cancer, so people visiting the exhibition can chat with her about what dying is like.

What we end up discovering is that this artist named Orchide is actually his mother. It turns out that Cyrus’s dad and his best friend used to go on an annual camping trip. As a result, his mother Roya was left with the wife of his friend named Laila. They end up falling in love and deciding that they want to escape Iran so they could be together. They had switched passports and it turns out that Laila was the one on the plane that got shot down. Roya ended up, escaping Iran to Turkey and then eventually New York City, where she started a new life. She ended up working at a restaurant, cleaning dishes, and then ultimately became famous as an artist when her future wife, a gallery owner, discovered her art.

Cyrus had visited his mother a few times, asking her questions about death. She ends up killing herself after their third meeting. She also left it up to her ex-wife, the gallery owner to break the news to Cyrus about what had happened.

The end was really heartbreaking, but Cyrus ended up discovering that he was also in love with his best friend named Z.

Overall, the book was poetically written, but a lot of things went over my head. I also was really frustrated with multiple of the main characters, which made it difficult again to connect with the book. The writing was stunning, and the narrator was amazing and perfectly captured the emotion I think that was trying to be evoked from the book. I however could not connect with it in the way that I wanted to. Overall was a great book, but it’s not something that I was able to connect with.