My rating for this is deeply personal; many people hate this book for the same reasons I love it. Some people love it for reasons I don't.

First, to me, this is obviously a dramatization of the 1979 Revolution in Iran and its aftermath, transposed to the US. Tehran went from a very liberal, highly Westernized city to a combination of Sharia law and "revolutionary justice" under martial law within a few short years. So while there is a sense of "it could happen here" that's spooked people for decades -- this IS the Dominionist goal in a nutshell -- the exact story isn't a total fit for the US, especially given the changes in the decades since publication. Dominionism reached the height of its power around the turn of the millennium, and has faded since, to be replaced by other forms of extremism.

That said, the premise isn't unbelievable enough to detract from the story.

And what a story it is. Meandering, jumping across time in memories and vignettes, sometimes explicitly admitting an untruth and sometimes leaving truth open to interpretation, as if it was really being told out loud. Incredibly, intensely, breathtakingly poetic at times; there are florid passages about the garden that make my heart break. Full of musing and deliberation, sometimes regret and sometimes an iron refusal to regret. Characters that offset the narrator in many different ways, so that her meekness doesn't become a one-note portrait of femininity throughout.

Those same charges have been leveled against it by detractors. We all enjoy what we enjoy, and roll our eyes at what others enjoy. You'll know if you enjoy those things.

Not that everything was perfect, of course. The drips of memory are deliberately coy right to the end, ensuring that each piece of the past is a cliffhanger to tide you over to the next. The epilogue is clumsy and ill-fitting, an experiment like the main story that doesn't hold up as well.

In the end, I connected with most of then characters in this book, and with the overall theme. I'm not afraid of it, but it's been at the back of my mind for years. That duality is where the book lives and thrives.