The 2008 recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, Khadivi offers a remarkable first novel that does not shy away from harsh subject matter. This first installment in a trilogy about three generations of Kurdish men is set in Persia in the 1920s as Reza Shah Pahlari comes to power. The story tracks the life of a Kurdish boy who loses his family in a massacre and then is taken in by the very soldiers responsible for making him an orphan. Reborn as Reza Khourdi in honor of the shah, the youth is so well indoctrinated by the shah's military that his superior officers decide to reward his performance as a soldier by giving him a command post in his homeland. Reza returns to the region with his new wife to fight his own people, Kurdish rebels, and continue their brutal subjugation in pursuit of the shah's vision of a modernized Iran. Khadivi excels at capturing Reza's spiritual torture as he subdues his personal tribal history, often at the violent expense of others. With her eloquent portrayal of Reza, Khadivi has created an epitomic character representing so many 20th-century and current cultural, ethnic, and national identity clashes. Highly recommended.-Faye A. Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In 1921 Persia, after a battlefield massacre, a Kurdish orphan is conscripted into the shah's army and given a new identity. Khadivi's debut spans almost six decades, during which the boy, renamed Reza Khourdi by the authorities, first proves his loyalty and his brutality and thenon the ground that his knowledge of Kurdish deviousness will be invaluableis promoted to captain and sent to his hometown, Kermanshah. Reza's task is to be ruthless in stamping out revolts. The homecoming reignites old emotions, reminds Reza of the innocent falcon-loving mama's boy he once was but can never be againand threatens to crack his faade and cost him the authority that is his dearest, almost his only, possession. Before his return, Reza marries a Tehrani woman, Meena. Their tragic, loveless marriage yields six children, until Rezahis wife is eight months pregnant with their seventh childone day poisons her tea. When her brothers come up from the capital and confront him with the overwhelming evidence of his crimeMeena's blood contains cyanide, arsenic and bleachReza, in the book's most chilling scene, makes a ceremony of surrendering and has himself locked up by his adjutant, the jailer in the town's one cell, which has never before been used. The magistrate, another underling, takes down the brothers' evidence, laughing all the while. The next morning, Reza has himself released. The historical material has unmistakable power, but the book is somewhat marred by a false and overlush lyricism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Khadivi's disturbing debut novel opens in 1921 in Iran's Zagros Mountains, where a young boy's job is to warn his father and uncles if the shah's army approaches. After an attack on the soldiers' camp, during which the boy's baba is pummeled to death, and all except the boy are killed, he is adopted by the soldiers as the orphan Kurd, a docile servant. Eight years later he has become a plebe in the great army of the shah and is given the name Reza Khourdi, his family history erased. At 15 his company attacks a Kurdish village. In the midst of his first kill, Reza remembers his past and realizes,  he is them. Promoted and assigned to a village near his home, he marries a woman who lives in opposition to his every memory, and teaches their children to hate the Kurds. Khadivi's writing, for which she recently won a Whiting Award, is luminous in this tragic story of an orphan of the earth,  which is rendered in prose that is by turns graphic and poetic.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2009 Booklist

Ironic, beautifully written, brutal and ugly, Khadivi's ambitious debut novel follows a Kurdish boy who is tragically and violently conscripted into the shah's army after his own people are slaughtered in battle. Assigned the name Reza Pejman Khourdi--Reza after the first shah of Iran, Pejman meaning heartbroken and Khourdi to denote he's an ethnic Kurd--the boy suppresses all things Kurdish within him, fueled by a sense of self-preservation and self-loathing. Channeling fear and hate into brutal acts against the Kurds, Reza makes a quick climb up the military career ladder, eventually gaining an appointment to Kermanshah, a Kurdish region in the north of Iran. There, as overseer of his own people, Reza promotes Kurdish assimilation and the budding nation of Iran while mercilessly silencing voices of Kurdish independence. As he grows old with his Iranian wife, Meena, Reza's internal conflicts simmer, then boil over, with unexpected and terrible results. This difficult but powerful novel, the first of a trilogy, introduces a writer with a strong, unflinching voice and a penetrating vision. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved